Theatre

Visit the King’s Head Theatre for one of the greatest theatrical surprises of the year

Amanda Abbington’s new show is heavily indebted to Noël Coward’s Hay Fever.Coward’s early play follows the tribulations of the superficial Bliss family and at first it was rejected by producers because it lacked action or incident. The oddly titled show, (This is not a) Happy Room, opens on the eve of a family wedding. Disaster strikes when the groom dies in a car cash and the nuptials are hastily transformed into a funeral. (Don’t ask how the dead body was released for burial so quickly.) Abbington plays Esther Henderson, a careless matriarch, who walked out on her children when they were small and left her firstborn, Laura, in charge of

The age of the strongman, Tesla under attack & matinee revivals

35 min listen

This week: welcome to the age of the strongman ‘The world’s most exclusive club… is growing,’ writes Paul Wood in this week’s Spectator. Membership is restricted to a very select few: presidents-for-life. Putin of Russia, Xi of China, Kim of North Korea and MBS of Saudi Arabia are being joined by Erdogan of Turkey – who is currently arresting his leading domestic political opponent – and Donald Trump, who ‘openly admires such autocrats and clearly wants to be one himself’. ‘This is the age of the strongman,’ Wood declares, ‘and the world is far more dangerous because of it.’  Despite their bombast, these ‘are often troubled characters’, products of difficult childhoods.

Why we’re flocking to matinees

The Starland Vocal Band were on to something. In their 1976 hit ‘Afternoon Delight’ they sang, in gruesomely twee harmony: ‘Gonna grab some afternoon delight/ My motto’s always been when it’s right it’s right/ Why wait until the middle of a cold, dark night?’ Granted, they were singing about rumpy-pumpy, not theatre-going, but for many of us the same principle applies.  ‘I’ve turned into the kind of person who loves toddling off to matinees,’ admitted my actor friend Timmy recently. He’s not the only one. I’m at that age when lunch is preferable to dinner and matinees appeal far more than evening shows. There’s something hedonistic about a matinee. When

Lloyd Evans

I wish someone would kill or eat useless Totoro 

My Neighbour Totoro is a hugely successful show based on a Japanese movie made in 1988. The setting is a haunted house occupied by two little girls who encounter various creatures rendered on stage by puppets. The story has no action, danger or jeopardy so it’s likely to bore small boys and their dads. Perhaps mums and daughters will appreciate it more. The big selling point is the puppetry whose quality varies. The naturalistic animals are done well. Cute yapping dogs, fluffy chickens scampering about, mischievous goats that steal maize from unguarded fields. The silliest creature is an orange latex cat equipped with 12 spindly legs that don’t work. It

Irresistible: Clueless, at the Trafalgar Theatre, reviewed

Cher Horowitz, the central character in Clueless, is one of the most irritating heroines in the history of movies. She’s a rich, slim, beautiful Beverly Hills princess obsessed with parties, boys and clothing brands. According to her, the world’s problems can easily be settled by using the solutions she applied to the seating plan at her dad’s birthday dinner. But Cher is also a creation of genius because she draws us into her life and makes us understand the raw, damaged reality that lies behind her superficial perfection. She’s not a privileged brat. She’s all of us. At the start of this musical remake, Cher takes us on a tour

A treat for nostalgic wrinklies: Punk Off!, at the Dominion Theatre, reviewed

Punk rock, packaged, parcelled, and boxed up as a treat for nostalgic wrinklies. That’s the deal with Punk Off!, a touring show that recently completed a lap of the country at the Dominion Theatre. Most of the audience were there to recall their rebellious heyday. ‘It’s about to get really, really loud,’ announced the compère, Kevin Kennedy, as the four-piece band hammered out ‘Sheena Is A Punk Rocker’ ‘and ‘If the Kids Are United’. Both hits sounded eerily unfamiliar. Why? Those raucous, pulsing rhythms can’t be turned into elevator jingles or a background drone at a shopping mall – so we rarely hear them. Just as well. Kennedy rattled through

Brian Cox’s Bach has to be heading for Broadway

The Score is a fine example of meat-and-potatoes theatre. Simple plotting, big characters, terrific speeches and a happy ending. The protagonist, J.S. Bach, receives a mysterious summons from Frederick the Great of Prussia. The long first act takes us through Bach’s professional woes and his physical infirmities. His weak vision is being treated by an English oculist, John Taylor, who tours Europe in a scarlet coach decorated with eyes. For unexplained reasons, Taylor decides to taste Bach’s urine, which is excessively sugary – a symptom of diabetes. When Bach reaches Frederick’s court in Potsdam he finds the atmosphere oppressive and alienating. Enter Voltaire. ‘Prussia is not a state in possession

How Armando Iannucci lost his edge

The BBC celebrated one of its own on Monday night. Armando Iannucci was treated to a fawning retrospective by Alan Yentob, and it opened with a crass piece of TV trickery. ‘Armando Iannucci is not an easy man to pin down,’ said Yentob, as if his quarry were a master criminal or an international terrorist. ‘For ten years, I’ve been trying to talk to one of Britain’s greatest comic talents.’ Iannucci, in his heyday, would have enjoyed dissecting this sort of bombastic hyperbole. This week, he connived in the hoax. Yentob ran through Iannucci’s CV. He was raised by affluent Glaswegians (plenty of colour photographs suggesting a comfortable income), and

Tedious and threadbare: Unicorn, at the Garrick Theatre, reviewed

Unicorn, Mike Bartlett’s new play, involves some characters in chairs discussing a sexual threesome. That’s the entire show. Polly (Nicola Walker) is a drunken crosspatch who wants to spice up her loveless marriage to Dr Nick (Stephen Mangan) by bringing a blonde lesbian into the bedroom. Nick, a dithering twerp, doesn’t care if it happens or not and he lets his gobby wife talk him into it. She’s desperate for a bit of girl-on-girl action because she detests straight men (apart from Nick) and she dated women before she got married. It’s not clear why Nick puts up with this charmless windbag who treats him like a naughty spaniel and

If you have two hours to spare, spend it anywhere but here: The Years reviewed

The Years is a monologue spoken by a handful of actresses, some young, some old enough to carry bus passes. They stand in black costumes on a white stage explaining to us the significance of memory, history and feelings. Then the story begins. The narrator is a precocious chatterbox born in France during the war who has no aim in life other than sensual gratification. She’s not a human being, just a cluster of nerves, like a taste bud, that registers nice or nasty, sweet or bitter. And that’s it. She has no morality. She doesn’t develop personally because her nature isn’t capable of emotional growth. Yet the audience is

Stylish facsimile of Carol Reed’s film: Oliver!, at the Gielgud Theatre, reviewed

Oliver! directed by Matthew Bourne is billed as a ‘fully reconceived’ version of Lionel Bart’s musical. Very little seems to have been reconceived. This stylish and dynamic show develops like an unblemished copy of Carol Reed’s film. Fair enough. Punters want comfort, not novelty when they go to see a 65-year-old musical. Billy Jenkins, as the Artful Dodger, captures every heart in the auditorium. But of course he does. It’s no slur on Jenkins to point out that the ‘Dodger’ is one of the greatest acting gigs in all musical theatre. Has it ever been done badly? The Oliver I saw, Raphael Korniets (one of three sharing the role), is

The problem of back-story in drama

Olga in Three Sisters, the opening speech: ‘Father died just a year ago, on this very day – the fifth of May, your name-day, Irina.’ Jeeves says somewhere in P.G. Wodehouse that people with monogrammed slippers are afraid of forgetting their names. Irina, the absent-minded sister, probably needed reminding it was her birthday. A useful side-effect is that the audience also knows exactly when and where we are. Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County begins with a frank information offload: Beverly Weston, the patriarch, conveniently explains to the new native-American hire, Johnna, the basic set-up: ‘My wife takes pills and I drink.’ This bald set-up is ‘concealed’ by digressions about Berryman,

An excellent sixth-form drama project: Santi & Naz, at Soho Theatre, reviewed 

Santi & Naz is a drama set in the Punjab in 1947 that uses an ancient and thrilling storyline about domestic violence. The main characters are a pair of young lesbians who plot to kill Naz’s bridegroom, Nadim, on the eve of the wedding. They discuss stabbing or poisoning him and eventually they decide to drown him in the village lake. This is a strange play. It wants to teach us about Indian society in the 1940s while assuming we’re experts There are many motives for this murder. Santi and Naz hate men. They detest the custom of marriage which forces women to endure painful sexual couplings. And Santi fears

Pious bilge: Kyoto, at @sohoplace, reviewed

The West End’s new political show, Kyoto, can’t be classed as a drama. A drama involves a main character engaged in a transformative personal journey. This is a secretarial round-up of various environmental summits, or ‘Cop’ meetings, held during the late 1980s and 1990s. If you remove the private jets, a Cop summit is a sort of parish council seminar about the probable weather during the summer fête. The material is extremely dull and yet it’s possible to turn dross into a gripping story if you hire a dramatist. So Big Oil has been torching the planet for 66 years and yet the West End hasn’t been burned to ashes

Lionel Shriver

Immigration’s theatre of the absurd

On the cusp of an almighty row over Trump’s planned mass deportations, let’s look to Europe for light relief. Last month, the pridefully left-wing management of the storied 19th-century Parisian theatre Gaité Lyrique, owned by the pridefully left-wing Paris council and traditionally the home of operettas, digital arts and musical performances, staged a free conference on ‘reinventing the refugee welcome in France’. The organisers literally invited their own downfall: 200 West African migrants who apparently felt very welcome indeed and refused to leave. Gaité Lyrique invited its own downfall: 200 West African migrants who refused to leave These passionate opera fans have since swelled to 350. The pridefully left-wing management

Cheerless and fussy: The Tempest, at Theatre Royal Drury Lane, reviewed

The Tempest is Shakespeare’s farewell, his final masterpiece or, if you’re being cynical, the play that made him jack it all in. Some actors admit that it can be hard to stage and dull to perform. What is it exactly? A children’s fairy tale and a soppy romance with snatches of drunken farce and political intrigue. Quite a muddle. The setting is famously eccentric. Shakespeare whisks the audience away from reality and drops them in a magical kingdom where a sanctimonious wizard rules over a population of goblins and fairies. The overbearing soundtrack keeps coming up with new ways to irritate your eardrums Some directors try to correct the Bard

What makes a good title?

Liszt’s compositions tend to have descriptive titles – ‘Wild Chase’; ‘Dreams of Love’ – whereas Chopin avoided titles. Thomas Wentworth Higginson wished titles on Emily Dickinson’s poems, opposed by his fellow editor Mabel Loomis Todd. They didn’t stick. Maybe this is why Dickinson is acclaimed but unread. ‘I heard a Fly buzz’ is easier to remember than 465. We can express this truth by quoting Dickens on the Bible in Little Dorrit: ‘such hiccupping reference as 2 Ep. Thess. C. iii, v. 6 & 7.’ Or by remembering how often we forget our several PINs. For poets, titles can be a resource, a useful press release before the actual poem

Lloyd Evans

Exquisite: Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, at Hampstead Theatre, reviewed

The Invention of Love opens with death. Tom Stoppard’s play about A.E. Housman starts on the banks of the Styx, where the recently deceased poet is waiting for Charon, the boatman, to ferry him across the water. Charon has been told to pick up ‘a scholar and a poet’ and he’s expecting two souls, not one. Houseman explains that he pursued both careers and is therefore a solo passenger. The play’s storyline emerges slowly and with immaculate taste. Stoppard is not one for cheap tricks This takes place in 1936, the year of Housman’s death, and we then flip back to Oxford in the 1870s. The river Styx becomes the

Brutal and brilliant portrait of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford

The Last Days of Liz Truss? is a one-woman show about the brief interregnum between Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. We first meet the future prime minister at a nursery school in Paisley where she orders the teachers to call her Elizabeth and not to use her first name, Mary. This establishes her combative, self-righteous nature and her utter dislike of authority. Truss is like the smell of gas indoors. Even a tiny amount is too much She left Oxford with a PPE degree and became a political activist while setting her sights firmly on parliament. (By researching the CVs of every sitting member, she had discovered that one in

Elton John’s The Devil Wears Prada is sumptuous but unmemorable

The Devil Wears Prada is a fairy tale about an aspiring female novelist, Andy, who receives a job offer from Runway, the nastiest and most influential fashion magazine in America. Miranda, the editor, is a Botoxed uber-bitch who doesn’t really want to hire Andy, but does anyway. And Andy doesn’t really want to work in fashion, but does anyway. Slightly odd. Visually, the show is a sumptuous treat that offers Olympic-standard costumes, set and lighting designs Andy is like Paul Pennyfeather in Decline and Fall, a bland but trustworthy cipher who bears witness to a fascinating world of excess and corruption. She’s barely a character, more a device. The best