Albion review – Mike Bartlett captures nation’s neurotic divisions

Almeida theatre, London
Victoria Hamilton is on breathtaking form as a grieving mother in the Doctor Foster writer’s richly layered play inspired by Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard

Gardens often acquire a symbolic value in drama. Since the one in Mike Bartlett’s fascinating, complex new play is called Albion, and is attached to a rambling Oxfordshire house, it is pretty clear we are watching is state-of-the-nation stuff. But what makes the play so enormously intriguing is that, as in his King Charles III, Bartlett shows us as a deeply divided people torn between the urge to preserve the past and to radically reform it.

Related: Mike Bartlett: Doctor Foster writer whose work 'attacks apathy'

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from The Guardian http://ift.tt/2hNH5aF