If the wigs didn’t do it, Robert Jones’s designs – austere simplicity in Bach’s humble home, gold and gilt in the Potsdam palace – would be a constant reminder that this is a big old play about big old stuff – music, art, beauty, justice etc – and it’s dutifully big and old and stuffy.
It doesn’t help that there was another big play about Bach just four years ago in London, Nina Raine’s Bach and Sons, nor that star attraction Brian Cox has actually played Bach before, in a 1984 TV movie called The Cantor of St Thomas’s.
But while the play has lofty ambitions and director Trevor Nunn knows how to stage them grandly, and despite a towering Cox as the main man, unlike Bach’s music too often the whole thing clunks and flounders.
And once the enjoyably crotchety showdown between Bach and Frederick is over, the piece runs out of puff, a slow fade out on a play which is all Bach and little bite.
Like listening to Bach’s music, familiarity and old-fashionedness ring through Oliver Cotton’s play about the meeting between Frederick the Great and Johann Sebastian the Even Greater.
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