Theatre: James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner is dazzlingly funny. Kim Cattrall is a revelation in a monstrous role

Good and bad at the National. The Amen Corner by James Baldwin is a wryly observed comedy drama written for a studio theatre. It’s an excellent small play. The director Rufus Norris pumps it full of steroids and tries to turn it into a great American epic like Streetcar or The Crucible. His staging suggests the finale of a country-house opera festival. Costly baggage impedes the script’s sprightly flow. On-stage jazzmen snivel through trombones and hack at double basses. Preening choirs warble and sway. Spare actors hang out of windows trying to look cool and indolent. The running time reaches a Napoleonic 155 minutes. Megalomania infects the furniture too. Baldwin asked for two cheap sets, a ramshackle kitchen and a dingy meeting-room. When designers approach the slums they generally go for a) the junk-shop ram-raid, or b) the stylish junk-shop ram-raid. Here we have c) the artless heap of cluttered grubbiness done on a Götterdämmerung budget.