Theatre

It’s touch and go whether the theatre will survive this latest assault. Some venues have pushed back their entire programme by four weeks, which is chaotic but manageable. Theatres mounting a panto are in a trickier position because they can’t trust Gove and Johnson not to extend the curfew into the festive season. November is the month when companies start to book venues for the Brighton Festival in May. What to do? Take the plunge or wait it out for another year? And the big decision about Edinburgh 2021 will have to be faced before the winter is over. The lockdown in spring was a financial and professional calamity but

Theatres can open if they want to. That’s the current position. The only factor keeping a playhouse dark is a lack of guts or imagination on the part of its leadership. A small pub in Vauxhall, The Eagle, is mounting new plays in its garden space to raise everyone’s morale. Punters must wear masks and sit in bubbles. ‘We’re adhering to the government guidelines,’ announced the artistic director before the start, ‘which are changing all the time.’ The show is a feelgood musical about drifters and dreamers in their twenties trying to make it in New York. Waverley wants to be an actress but her plans are blown off course

In Bad Taste is a slapstick comedy about five female terrorists who murder the governor of the Bank of England. They chop him to pieces, cook him in a casserole and devour the lot. Their plan is to ‘eat the rich’, literally, and to trigger a worldwide revolution. After this grimly hilarious opening the script takes a sharp U-turn when one of the women makes a speech denouncing misogynists. The others agree to drop the revolt against the wealthy and to hunt down nasty men instead. Each woman suggests a candidate for execution: a male colleague who works too sluggishly, a father-in-law who makes judgmental comments, a drunkard who gropes

Southwark Playhouse has revived an American show, The Last Five Years, whose run was cancelled in March. In advance, I received an email outlining the theatre’s new rules, which appeared to exceed the minimum legal requirements. At the venue, I found that the main entrance had become the exit while the side door had become the main entrance. What for? Perhaps an unsubtle reminder that ‘everything’s changed now, pal, so get used to it’. The queue on the pavement moved at a turtle’s pace because the usher gave each playgoer a homily about the new regime before allowing them to pass through Checkpoint Charlie. Inside it was like an army

Curious thing, writer’s block. If you believe it exists. Terry Pratchett didn’t. ‘There’s no such thing,’ he said. ‘It was invented by people in California who couldn’t write.’ He had a point. Writers write, period. But there is a syndrome in my house known as Not Starting Anything New Through Fear Of It Being Not Very Good. Less catchy than ‘writer’s block’, but arguably a more accurate description of the condition. My Covid-induced version of the above involved endlessly ‘honing’ an already completed play about my mother to devastatingly little effect and musing on the oldest creative question of all: is there a formula for writing success, and if so

The season of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads continues at the Bridge. In The Hand of God we meet Celia, a posh antiques dealer, who befriends old maids in the hope of acquiring their valuables cheaply. Like everyone in her trade she uses play-acting and mind games to give her the advantage while haggling. If her enemy falters, she pounces. A man visits her shop and becomes visibly excited by a framed drawing which Celia hoped to flog for £30. Spotting his eagerness, she trebles the price. He pays up and hurries out. Later she learns that the drawing was by an old master whose style she failed to recognise. Millions

Collectors of TV titles that sound as if they were thought of by Alan Partridge will presumably have spotted Danny Dyer on Harold Pinter. As Dyer himself understatedly put it: ‘This might seem an unlikely pairing: the likely lad and the Nobel Prize winner.’ Yet, what made the programme such an intriguing if undeniably peculiar watch is that the pairing in question wasn’t dreamed up by a desperate (or drunk) commissioning editor. In 2000, aged 22, Dyer auditioned for Pinter’s Celebration at the Almeida Theatre in Islington. ‘I knew the money would be rubbish,’ he told us, ‘so I didn’t care much.’ Nor, unlike his rivals, did he really know who

It has roughly the same proportions as Shakespeare’s Globe. The Roman Theatre in Verulamium (St Albans) is an atmospheric ruin with low flint walls, a banked rampart and a single stone column. Historians estimate that the circular space, measuring about 40 yards in diameter, would have enabled 7,000 spectators to watch plays, gladiatorial contests and executions. That figure seems too high. A capacity of 1,500 might be nearer the mark. These days the venue hosts outdoor theatre. Playgoers who sit at the edge of the auditorium can reach out and touch the ancient flint walls and run their fingers across the grain of the Roman concrete. During the August cold

For nearly six months our subsidised playhouses, notably the National Theatre, have been dark. What have we missed? Not much. Some would say nothing at all. And this has come as a surprise to those of us who were led to believe that the subsidised theatre is critical to ‘the national conversation’. It turns out that the nation can happily debate political and social issues without the help of playwrights or actors. Perhaps it’s time to re-examine our state-funded theatres and the reasons we support them. The National Theatre was set up in 1963, soon after the establishment of the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1961, and both received funding from

The virus has broken Edinburgh. The shattered remnants of the festival are visible on the internet. Here’s what happened. The international festival has been reduced to one filmed theatre commission and a handful of videoed musical offerings. The Fringe has survived but in a horribly mutilated form. Two of its most prestigious brands, the Pleasance and the Assembly Rooms (which host hundreds of shows between them every year), have pulled out entirely. They’re so well established that they’ll have no difficulty restarting in 12 months’ time. Another big name, the Gilded Balloon, is offering a few online shows and some recorded highlights from previous years. Lesser-known outfits such as the-SpaceUK

Okay, I admit it. I have a girl crush on Juliet Stevenson. Ever since I first saw her in the 1990 film Truly, Madly, Deeply with Alan Rickman, I have loved her sexy, round and intelligent tones. Imagine how excited I was to discover, therefore, that you can have Juliet in your ear for a whole hour and 15 minutes while you sit through a so-called ‘sound installation’ — or rather an audio staging — of Blindness, the current offering at the Donmar Warehouse and the first opening since lockdown. Sitting in a darkened theatre studio, with strobe lighting and headphones, you are seated in your own space, and socially

So the madness continues. Planes full of passengers are going everywhere. Theatres full of ghosts are going bust. My first press night since March took place at a monumental Victorian building in Wandsworth where concerts are staged in an open-air courtyard. The entry process was less fussy than I’d expected. I didn’t need my phone and there was no ‘track and trace’ nonsense. A masked official aimed a ray gun at my face and showed me a reading — 36.4ºC. I’d passed the temperature test. He then pointed me towards a hand sanitiser. ‘Is it compulsory?’ I said politely. A look of fear crossed his eyes, as if violence were

Back to the West End at last. After a four- month lay-off, I grabbed the first available chance to catch a show in central London. I joined 20 enthusiasts at the ‘West End Musical — Silent Disco Walking Tour’, which convened outside a Fitzrovia pub. We were given a pink bracelet and a set of headphones that pumped musical hits into our ears. Our cheerleader, Sean, introduced us to his helpers, Tiny Tom and Sticky Vicky, who taught us a quick dance move. It transpired that we were the performers as well as the audience. We set off across the West End like a military convoy of unemployed choristers. At

‘Give us a date, mate!’ That was the sound of Andrew Lloyd Webber begging Boris Johnson to announce when the West End can return to normal. He made his plea at the London Palladium on 23 July, where he was testing a new set of Covid-compliant measures during a one-hour solo show by Beverley Knight. It was the first indoor live performance in the capital since lockdown began. The impresario’s advance preparations had been exhaustively thorough. He arranged for the entire venue to be hosed down with an anti-viral fluid that kills the bug for up to four weeks. Every door handle had been fitted with a special cover that

The BBC announces Merchant of Venice as if it were a Hollywood blockbuster. ‘In the melting pot of Venice, trade is God.’ The RSC, which staged the show in 2015, calls it ‘a thrilling, contemporary interpretation’. Each element in Polly Findlay’s production looks fine. Jacob Fortune-Lloyd and Patsy Ferran (Bassanio and Portia) are as cute as a pair of Love Island hotties. But the costumes are hard to decipher and they seem attached to no particular era. Most of the characters wear chic, well-tailored outfits except for Antonio (Jamie Ballard) who sports a T-shirt and seems close to tears most of the time. He and Bassanio are presented as openly