Brian Cox and Nicole Ansari-Cox Star in Oliver Cotton’s New Play, ‘The Score’

Brian Cox in "The Score" at Theatre Royal Bath. (Photo by Manuel Harlan)

Goes to Show

September 11, 2026 Rob Weinert-Kendt Leave a comment

Fugue Off: Brian Cox Plays a Well-Tempered Bach in ‘The Score’

A chat with the acclaimed actor and his wife, Nicole Ansari-Cox, onstage now in Oliver Cotton’s new play at Shakespeare Theatre in D.C.

By Rob Weinert-Kendt

Logan Roy was a man of few words, many of them gruff and/or profane. But the Scottish actor Brian Cox, who memorably brought that Lear-like media mogul to craggy life in the epochal HBO series Succession , has assayed many other, much more voluble characters in his long and acclaimed career. The first role I saw him play, in the Taper’s production of Skylight back in 1997 , was as Tom Segeant, a monied, somewhat boisterous restaurateur trying to rekindle a relationship with a younger woman . Tom was a character Logan Roy might have had drinks with, though he’d probably let Tom do most of the talking. Broadway and West End audiences may also recall Cox in a role many miles away from Roy’s temperament, not to mention his politics: as Max, a fiercely Marxist Cambridge don dealing with an ideological crisis and a straying young mentee, in Stoppard’s Rock ’n’ Roll , some 20 years ago .

I thought about Stoppard’s Max as I read the script for The Score , a new play by Oliver Cotton that begins performances tonight at Washington, D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre , under Trevor Nunn’s direction (who also directed Rock ’n’ Roll , incidentally). That’s because, in the play’s leading role, Cox is called upon to play a similarly passionate true believer against a backdrop of political upheaval, and opposite a young person in whom he’s invested many of his hopes: In this case, the role is composer Johann Sebastian Bach, as he meets with, and charily writes music for, the despotic Prussian king Frederick the Great, and tries to impart his ideals to his talented son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, who serves as one of Frederick’s many court composers. The year is 1747, not long before Bach’s death due to complications from eye surgery, and Nunn’s production, which premiered at Theatre Royal Bath in 2023 , is set in period, periwigs and harpsichords and all.

Remarkably, it is Cox’s second time playing Bach: He also starred in the 1984 TV film The Cantor of St. Thomas’s , filmed on location in Bach’s German church. In a recent interview, Cox said that at the time he found the composer “a really boring guy.” He has since “completely reviewed my whole idea of Bach,” and it’s not only thanks to Oliver Cotton’s play. Cotton, who happens to be one of Cox’s oldest friends, is also a dab hand on the guitar, and one day he sat down and played Bach’s Chaconne for Cox. “I was never into Bach, but that was just a revelation to me. I couldn’t believe it was Bach! I said, ‘That’s extraordinary.’”

Still, in trying to drill down into Bach as a character, Cox—not a musician himself, though he did once play Harold Hill, delightfully —found the action of Cotton’s play most helpful.

“I mean, he has a personality, but it’s slightly invisible,” said Cox. “Bach is kind of mysterious.” What The Score gives Bach is a cause, and a number of obstacles: Living in Leipzig amid a Prussian military occupation, Bach is particularly incensed when a soldier faces no consequences for raping a blind girl. Ostensibly visiting Potsdam to see his son, Carl, he’s really there to give Frederick a piece of his mind about the crimes of his army and his imperial ambitions, while for his part Frederick and his court composers have a scheme to trip up the master composer by handing him a musical theme they think he can’t possibly develop into a fugue. (Fat chance: It will turn into one of his greatest works .) So it’s an angry, somewhat harried Bach that we meet in The Score , though he also gets plenty of stage time to share his music. Does Cox feel Bach channeled his passions and frustrations into his music, I wondered?

“Well, because he’s essentially religious, the music is a celebration of his faith,” said Cox. “Whereas Beethoven’s music is always asking questions, Bach is about underlining the spirituality of life.”

If Cox feels an affinity with Bach as a creative artist, it is first and foremost on a technical level.

“He was a superb craftsman—he understood his craft probably better than any musician,” said Cox, whose approach to acting is similarly detailed . “When you’re playing a role, it’s like a jigsaw, and you’re always trying to put it together into some kind of shape.” Conveying Bach’s sincere faith in the divine is a matter, Cox said, of following Bach’s “powerful voice.” As written in The Score , the role of Bach “marches you” into the deep religious and philosophical questions Bach was wrestling with. “You don’t have to overwork it,” said Cox. “You just have to be in the middle of it. You have to give yourself over to it.”

Playing Bach’s wife, the singer Anna Magdalena, is Cox’s real-life spouse, Nicole Ansari-Cox, with whom he’s acted in a number of projects (including Rock ’n Roll ) and directed in the play Sinners . Raised in Germany, where Bach is “in the mother’s milk,” Ansari-Cox, who joined Cox for our interview, called The Score “a really important play for these times. It seems to be a play about something that happened in the 18th century, but there are ripple effects today that have such resonance.”

While the play depicts the confrontation of an artist with a political leader to whom he’s virulently opposed, life is unlikely to imitate art when the show plays in D.C. Ansari-Cox said that she and her husband spoke to Shakespeare Theatre artistic director Simon Godwin about the extra-theatrical expectations raised by playing in the nation’s capital. As Ansari-Cox put it, “We said we want it in writing that we do not have to shake hands with people we do not want to shake hands with.”

As the subject of our terrible current president loomed, Cox mostly held himself back. Repeating a plea he’s heard more than once, he joked, “Brian, don’t get political.”

Not Quite ‘Vanya’

I’ve got a lot of reservations on the calendar as the new season kicks into gear, but I don’t have many theatre outings to report since my last column. While on a family trip to Dublin last month, I did catch Conor McPherson’s new play The Brightening Air at the Gate Theatre. I’m a longtime fan of McPherson (in fact the first play I saw by him was St. Nicholas , starring Brian Cox ), but my hot take on his work has always been that he’s stronger on monologues than on dramaturgy. For me the high point of his artistry has always been the haunting three-hander Port Authority , a piece constructed entirely of alternating monologues that finally add up to a devastating whole. And in plays like The Weir and Shining City and The Seafarer , it has been the August Wilson-like stemwinders McPherson gives to some characters that I recall most fondly. I should add that I had a blast geeking out with him about Bob Dylan when he brought Girl From the North Country to the Public in 2018, though, as it turns out, I didn’t much care for the show .

As with the pairing of Dylan and McPherson, I could not have been more on board for the source material of The Brightening Air , which the playwright acknowledges is partly inspired by an adaptation he did of Uncle Vanya that, bittersweetly, he never got to see thanks to the Covid lockdown. ( It was filmed , though, and I’ve had friends I trust tell me it’s their favorite Vanya ever; it’s on my queue to watch at some point.) So I was chuffed to see the influence of Vanya —one of the works of art that is dearest to me —all over the new play, set in a rural homestead in the 1980s, among an extended multigenerational family in which all the wrong people are quietly in love with each other and an older man in questionable health intermittently pontificates about the world.

There’s a lot of beautiful writing in the play, and some piercing performances, particularly by Seán McGinley, as that bloviating old man, and Judith Roddy as a woman poised, in the show’s Vanya -verse, somewhere between the abandon of Yelena and the yearning of Sonya. But in all I found the play itself a bit meandering and desultory, tendencies that weren’t helped by McPherson’s rather fuzzy direction. Chris O’Dowd, who was so affecting as Lenny in Of Mice and Men on Broadway in 2014 , seemed oddly cast as a wayward Lothario, though he too had his moments. Still, sometimes great moments are the best we can expect from a piece of theatre, and for those I am grateful.

More From American Theatre

When Misha Met Ronnie: Dallas Theater Center’s ‘Reykjavik86’

_Originally reported by [American Theatre](https://www.americantheatre.org/2026/09/11/fugue-off-brian-cox-plays-a-well-tempered-bach-in-the-score/)._