Hippie haven

A mad leap into the dark on the South Bank. And I’m all for mad leaps into the dark. A big-name cast has been assembled for a new play by an untested writer at the 900-seater Lyttelton theatre. Cripes. Stephen Beresford is a Rada graduate who knows his way around the dramatic repertoire. And he seems to have approached his first commission from the National in a spirit of dazzling insouciance. ‘Hey, I’ll just nick everything from Chekhov: the plot, the setting, the characters, the relationships and the atmosphere. And no one’ll notice!’ Well, there are smarter ways to go poaching. If you steal from a lesser dramatist, you can improve what you’ve stolen. But if you mug a genius, his genius will embarrass you.

The location is a ramshackle seaside house in Devon where Judy Haussman, a drugged-up old hippie, lives with her spiky daughter, Libby, and her even spikier grand-daughter, Summer.