Brian Cox heads a musical dynasty in Shakespeare's "The Score"

Peter De Jersey (Voltaire, left) and Brian Cox (J.S. Bach, right) in The Score, Shakespeare Theatre Company. Photo: Teresa Castracane

Shakespeare Theatre Company and its artistic director, Simon Godwin, have brought Oliver Cotton’s recent play The Score stateside. Premiered in 2023 at Theatre Royal Bath, the play stars Brian Cox as Johann Sebastian Bach during his May 1747 visit to the court of Frederick the Great in Potsdam. Cox, the star of the television series Succession, has come to Washington, along with some members of the British cast, for a run at Harman Hall, seen Thursday evening.

Cox is sharp-tongued and cantankerous as the fabled composer, who goes to the Prussian court to visit his son C.P.E. Bach (played ably by Jamie Wilkes), one of a stable of composers employed there. The elder Bach is advanced in age, only three years from his own death. His demise will be partly due to the ill-advised eye surgery that is discussed in the play, somewhat prematurely. Cotton has Bach challenge the Prussian king about his role in the Second Silesian War, an ahistorical invention.

The play soft-pedals the actual revelation of Bach’s visit: The Musical Offering, an intricate, complex work inspired by the theme Frederick the Great gave to Bach during the visit. Whether the king himself actually wrote the theme, or whether his court composers made it more forbidding is a matter of speculation. The melody is close in style to themes by Handel and others, but whatever its virtues or challenges, Bach made one of the most varied collections of musical elaborations out of it. Little of that is mentioned in the play.

Cox’s main foil in the play is Frederick the Great, given a wry, arrogant interpretation by Stephen Hagan. The scenes of confrontation between the monarch and the Thomaskantor are beyond fanciful, as is the concluding scene in which Frederick visits Bach’s home in Leipzig. Bach was most likely dazzled and flattered by the king’s attention. As the Bach-Archiv Leipzig has noted of the visit to Potsdam, “it was the only time when Bach was still alive that he was mentioned on the front page of a newspaper,” when the Berlinische Nachrichten reported on Bach’s reception.

Good fun is had by the range of Frederick’s servants, from the humble maid Emelia (Juliet Garricks) to the trio of royal composers, Carl Graun (Matthew Romain), Johann Quantz (Christopher Staines), and Franz Benda (Toby Webster). Whatever Frederick the Great’s faults, he was a first-rate musical patron.

Frederick also collected writers and philosophers, most famously Voltaire. While it is true that the French philosophe resided at Potsdam in the early 1750s, he was not present during Bach’s brief visit. Peter De Jersey plays him as an over-the-top French caricature, among the least convincing roles in the play. Voltaire soon enough made himself a nuisance at Potsdam, even referring to stories about Frederick’s homosexuality, one open secret among many at his court.

While Nicole Ansari-Cox, who happens to be Brian Cox’s wife, makes a piquant Anna Magdalena Bach, the role seemed almost entirely unnecessary to the plot, one of the elements that should probably be cut to shorten a long run time. Trevor Nunn, the director of Lady Jane (an Ionarts favorite film), has done well to minimize the play’s longueurs with a snappy production. Robert Jones’s lavish costumes and the musical soundworld designed by Sophie Cotton add much needed diversion as well.

The run of The Score has been extended to October 25. shakespearetheatre.org