The Score

Oliver Cotton’s The Score, now playing at the Theatre Royal Haymarket under the assured direction of Trevor Nunn, is a warm and richly textured exploration of art, power, and morality. Brian Cox gives a towering performance as Johann Sebastian Bach a man at the height of his career but still worked to the bone even as his eyesight fails.

Set in 1747, the play dramatizes the fateful meeting between the aging composer and the ambitious Frederick the Great (Stephen Hagan). Initially reluctant to travel to Potsdam from his Leipzig home—knowing Frederick’s forces had ravaged his city—Bach is drawn into a tense personal and intellectual battle with the young king.

Robert Jones’s set elegantly transitions between the rustic warmth of Bach’s home and the gilded formality of Frederick’s court. Opening at home with his wife Anna (played by his Cox’s real-life wife Nicole Ansari-Cox), there is at once a poignant intimacy to the drama. Cotton’s script, dense with ideas yet laced with humour, successfully brings the audience close the heart of both court and home, teasing out the clash between artistic purity and political pragmatism, faith and reason in an entirely human way.

Cox commands the stage with a presence at once imposing and deeply vulnerable. His Bach is irascible, driven, and weighed down by the loss and hardship of his later years. Opposite him, Hagan’s Frederick has a youthful charm and fabulous costumes —bullied by a brutal father to take a cold calculating view of war and to see the arts as a means of control rather than an expression of the soul. Their verbal duels crackle with energy as the relationship develops. At times Cox feels like the father Frederick might have wished he had.

Due to run until April 26th this is an unmissable opportunity to see Brian Cox grapple with the humanity of the greatest composers of all time, who many of us know so little about. Bach it seems was not just a musical genius but a man grappling with his place in a changing world.


Photo credit: Manuel Harlan