The Score at Theatre Royal Haymarket

Is it possible for a lone performance to both electrify and deflate a whole play in equal measure? It’s a question worth pondering as Brian Cox tears into Oliver Cotton’s enjoyable but thin The Score. As Johann Sebastian Bach in his twilight years, travelling to meet a commission from the warmongering King Frederick of Prussia, Cox is all booming gusto, mordant irascibility and pained, righteous fury. When recalling an encounter with the king’s men to his adult son, he all but quivers with grief for the injustices they’ve meted out to others, losses as keenly felt as if they were his own.

It’s a big performance, and it can feel – especially in its strained first act – as if Trevor Nunn’s production is largely content to be swallowed whole by it, permitting a procession of wholly functional supporting roles (Jamie Wilkes as the earnest scion of his father’s musical legacy; Nicole Ansari-Cox as the composer’s predictably long-suffering spouse) to set the board before Bach comes blowing through to knock it down. These roles are capably performed, but the play is so occupied with Bach – and we the audience are already so comfortably assured of the righteousness of his position – that it can often feel as if Cox is in an echo chamber alone, with the same push-pull dynamic doomed to repeat itself with all his scene partners. Bach will speak his mind unfettered and unafraid of royal retaliation, and those close to him will implore him to stop being so stubbornly incautious, bowled over all the same by their love of the man’s uncompromised ways.   

What devout old Johann lacks for much of the play is a true adversary against which to spark, and in the second half, he finally gets one. As the king to whom Bach intends to speak his mind, Stephen Hagan is smugly preening, almost to the point of camp and a welcome injection of disreputable energy. The – no doubt largely fictionalised – meeting of king and composer is the play’s centre of orbit, and it is a highly entertaining escalation of passive aggression coated in niceties to active, mutual fury. Bach’s dissent to the king’s war-hungry ways does not offer the most sophisticated alignment with contemporary violent invasions (or “interventions”, as the king resolves to call them) but for a time, Cotton’s play feels invigorated with newfound clarity of purpose and moral outrage.

It’s a pity, then, that The Score defangs itself come its conclusion, contriving another meeting between the king and Bach that strains plausibility while ultimately arriving at the same perfunctory conclusion the play risks prioritising over any larger, more complex point: that Bach was not one to back down for anything, and you’ve got to hand it to him.

Ultimately, The Score bets big on the confrontation at its centre and finds that investment to be wisely placed. One only wishes the surrounding play were more dynamic, but much of the scenes both anticipating and in the aftermath of Bach’s royal audience can feel like padding absent of true dramatic tension. Nonetheless, it’s a fine showcase for Cox, whose conviction is magnetic enough to bend a whole play around. Perhaps a tighter version of The Score could have provided more than mere scaffolding to his performance.

Thomas Messner
Photos: Manuel Harlan

The Score is at Theatre Royal Haymarket from 20^th February until 26^th April 2025. For further information or to book visit the theatre’s website here.