The Score starring Brian Cox in the West End – review

“All murderers are punished. Unless they kill in large numbers to the sound of trumpets.” So quips Voltaire in Oliver Cotton’s play, which transfers from Theatre Royal Bath.

It’s 1747 and the philosopher is mediating a confrontation between King Frederick II of Prussia – a trumpet-accompanied murderer extraordinaire – and the composer Johann Sebastian Bach, who is appalled by the horrors that Frederick’s latest war has brought to his hometown. The men also stand at odds on faith – Bach is deeply religious, Frederick is an atheist and proponent of Enlightenment – and the ideological sparks are flying.

The pair did in fact meet in real life but their skirmish had a more musical bent. Frederick invited Bach to court and set him a fiendish improvisation challenge. Bach triumphed and subsequently wrote the Musical Offering, one of his last and greatest instrumental works, for the king.

The meeting between the men and their clashing values is billed as the play’s meat. But in truth, it’s a captivating but all-too-short crescendo in this musing, meandering play.

The action wanders through Bach’s grudging farewell to his wife, ailing health, arrival at court where he reunites with the king’s composers (including his own son Carl), and the set-up of the musical challenge. All to an ostinato of socio-political and religious rumination.

Despite Robert Jones’s sumptuous set and costumes, free-flowing jokes, and the kind of consummate directing you’d expect from Trevor Nunn, it feels turgid at times. And especially so in the aftermath of Bach and Frederick’s main confrontation, when we move to Leipzig for more contemplation and a final, less electric, meeting between the pair.

But this play has a trick up its sleeve: its Bach is Brian Cox (perhaps best known as Succession’s Logan Roy) and he is mesmerising. So much so that any aimless spots or protracted scenes just feel like extra opportunities to watch him at work.

Cotton’s Bach is complex – a tender husband and father, a gracious professional, deeply empathetic. A gentle man. And yet he is fierce in his beliefs, prone to outbursts of rage and fits of tears. Cox balances every facet with the same light but sure touch. There’s the odd line fumble but we forgive him instantly.

Stephen Hagan has an equally tricky juggle on his hands as Frederick. Initially the royal man-child of many a comedy stereotype, his menace grows. Soon, he’s swinging from measured and articulate to wounded to explosive with all of the head-spinning unpredictability of any dangerous ruler worth their salt.

The rest of the cast give stellar support, and it’s particularly moving to see Nicole Ansari-Cox (Cox’s real-life spouse) as his onstage wife. Their intimacy, formed over 20 years of marriage, glows from the stage. Peter de Jersey, meanwhile, is faintly ridiculous as Voltaire, butchering French phrases and slipping into RP, but is roundly accepted by the audience as a charming anomaly who has perhaps strayed onto stage from a local pantomime.

Unlike Prussia under Frederick’s rule, this play does not drive doggedly forward at all costs. But luckily, its leader makes the circuitous journey enjoyable.