Theatre

Una is a psychological drama about a woman who was abused by a man when she was 12, and who confronts him 15 years later, and it’s a hoot. I’m toying with you. Of course it isn’t. It’s disquieting. It’s disturbing. It’s difficult. It’s 90 minutes of uncomfortably shifting in your chair and wishing you were at the latest heist caper that doesn’t make sense. But it is also compelling, up to a point, and your responses will be so complicated that you won’t know where to start unpicking them. Or how. The film is based on the play Blackbird by the Scottish playwright David Harrower, which has won multiple

Truman Capote should have been called Truman Persons. His father, Archulus, abbreviated his first name and introduced himself as Arch Persons. ‘And that,’ scoffed his son, ‘sounded like a flock of bishops.’ The young scribbler was thrilled when his divorced mother married a rich Cuban, Joseph Capote, whose zippy and eccentric name he gladly adopted. He got a job at the New Yorker and found the magazine’s celebrated wits, including Dorothy Parker and James Thurber, were embittered molluscs who hated each other. Capote’s literary life, as related by Bob Kingdom, is a parade of inspired bitchiness. He had the knack of getting to a character’s core problem. For Gore Vidal

Brexit the Musical is a peppy satire written by Chris Bryant (not the MP, he’s a lawyer). Musically the show is excellent and the impressions of Boris and Dave are amusing enough, but the storyline doesn’t work and the script moves in for the kill with blunted weapons. Everyone is forgiven as soon as they enter. Boris swans around Bunterishly, Dave oozes charm, Theresa May frowns and pouts in her leather trousers, and nice Michael Gove tries terribly hard to be terribly friendly. Andrea Leadsom, known to the public as a furtive and calculating blonde, is played by a sensational actress who belts out soul numbers while tap-dancing in high

What is the Edinburgh Fringe? It’s a sabbatical, a pit stop, a pause-and-check-the-map opportunity for actors who don’t quite know where to go next. Alison Skilbeck has written a ‘serio-comic celebration’ of Shakespeare and her performance attracts a decent crowd for a show that starts at noon. She plays a fruity-voiced thesp, Artemis Turret, who delivers lectures about the Bard’s older females to groups of layabout pensioners gathered in a scout hut. It’s pure Joyce Grenfell. Good fun, too, but without much potential beyond the fringe. Dominic Holland’s show, Eclipsed, is about his life as a fallen comedy god. In the 1990s he was on telly all the time and

Conor McPherson’s new play is set in dust-bowl Minnesota in 1934. We’re in a fly-blown boarding house owned by skint, kindly Nick who has designs on a sexy widow with a big inheritance coming. Good opening. Roll the story. But there’s more. Nick’s useless son is a depressed novelist entangled with a beautiful governess betrothed to a rich man she doesn’t love. An even better opening. Roll the story. But wait. Nick has a black maid called Marianne whom he rescued as a baby and raised as one of the family. An interesting complication. Roll the story. No wait. Marianne claims to be pregnant but declines to reveal whether the

The Edinburgh Festival was founded as a response to war. The inaugural event, held in 1947, was the brainchild of Rudolf Bing, the manager of Glyndebourne Opera, and Henry Harvey Wood, a British Council grandee. Both were convinced that a festival of music and theatre was needed to restore the artistic heritage of Europe after six years of devastation. Edinburgh recommended itself as the host city because of its cultural prestige, its picturesque location (to rival Salzburg), and its ample store of theatres and hotels that could accommodate hundreds of performers and thousands of visitors. That the Luftwaffe hadn’t flattened the city was a significant mark in its favour. The

The RSC’s summer blockbuster is about Queen Anne. It’s called Queen Anne. It opens at the Inns of Court where drunken wags are satirising the royals with a naughty sketch about boobs and beer guts. Everyone on stage pretended this was hilarious. A few audience members did too, out of politeness. The principal characters arrive with their dramatic goals on display. Queen Anne wants to rule wisely. Her general, Marlborough, wants to conquer widely. His wife, Sarah, wants to help her monarch to rule wisely and her husband to conquer widely. And Sarah’s scheming cousin, Abigail, wants to befriend the Queen so that she can marry a steady salary. These

Shubbak, meaning ‘window’ in Arabic, is a biennial festival taking place in various venues across London. The brochure reads like an A to Z of human misery. All the tired phrases from the Middle East’s history lurch up and poke the onlooker in the eye: ‘revolution’, ‘dystopia’, ‘cries of pain’, ‘ruins’, ‘waking nightmare’. The agony is leavened with slivers of earnest pretention. Corbeaux is a ballet designed for Marrakesh railway station by dancers who ‘take possession of public spaces’. Ten women with hankies over their hairdos move in ‘geometric alchemical arrangements’ making ‘piercing sounds and extraordinary cries’. I decided to give that a miss and plumped instead for Taha at

It was most odd. Four decades after I’d walked into the Sun to start my first shift as a news sub editor, I was sitting in a small theatre in the heart of La La Labour-land (the Almeida in Corbyn’s Islington) watching a play where I knew all the characters, as I both worked with them and worshipped them. There was Rupert Murdoch. There was Sun editor Larry Lamb, his deputy Bernard Shrimsley, Page Three photographer Beverley Goodway, and even production supremo Ray Mills who, due to his northern background, was known as Biffo — Big Ignorant Fucker From Oldham. How much would that acronym be worth at an employment

Anatomy of a Suicide looks at three generations of women in various phases of mental collapse. They line up on a stage that resembles a grey dungeon while sad events unfold around them. The first woman gets pregnant. The second takes heroin. The third argues with a lesbian about a fish. Their lives span several decades but their stories are presented simultaneously, and this tripartite method conceals the plain fact that the events dramatised are too flimsy to merit theatrical portrayal. A soap opera would baulk at such scenes: a druggie teenager bores a cameraman with a list of gloomy soundbites; a female wedding guest is partially seduced by a

The National Theatre could hardly resist Barber Shop Chronicles. The play shines a light on a disregarded ethnic community, black urban males, who like to hang around in barber salons seeking friendship, laughs and tittle-tattle. Setting the play in a single venue would just be a sitcom, like Desmond’s, so the show establishes a series of shops stretching from London to the capitals of various sub-Saharan nations. This makes it a global epic. In theory, at least. In fact, it’s still a sitcom with some melodramatic bits on the end. The disjoined structure is tiresome at first as the action keeps legging it from Britain to Nigeria and Ghana and

Sand in the Sandwiches is the perfect show for those who feel the West End should be an intellectual funfair. It sets out to amuse, surprise, divert, uplift and nothing more. Edward Fox’s biographical portrait of John Betjeman has a smattering of his most famous poems ingeniously woven into the narrative. Fox knows his stuff. His shrill, elongated upper-middle-class accent is 99 per cent impersonation and 1 per cent exaggeration. He reminds us that when Betjeman said ‘Edwardian’ he rhymed the second syllable with card, not sword. From early boyhood Betjeman knew that poetry would be his trade. Aged 14, he read the sonnets of Oscar Wilde’s chum, Bosie, and

Georg Büchner, a justly neglected German playwright, died at the age of 23 leaving a half-finished script about a mad soldier and his cheating girlfriend. This relic has fascinated dramatists ever since because Büchner is regarded as a visionary left-wing artist cruelly stolen before his time. (Not a moment too soon, if you ask me.) Jack Thorne is the latest to rehash the leftovers. It’s 1981 and we’re in a divided Berlin. We meet a mopey British squaddie, Woyzeck, who shares a flat with his girlfriend from Derry who has the voice of a seagull and the personality of a dishcloth. The flat pongs because it’s located over a slaughterhouse.

The Olivier describes Salomé by Yaël Farber as a ‘new’ play. Not quite. It premièred in Washington a couple of years ago. And I bet Farber was thrilled at the chance to direct this revival at the National’s biggest and best equipped stage. She approaches the Olivier’s effects department like a pyromaniac in a firework factory. She wants everything to go off at once. And it does. Goatherds yodel. Bells bong. Flutes warble. Birds parp. A revolving conveyor belt twirls spare actors around the stage in dizzy circles. Chord surges swell and fade on the soundtrack. Kneeling shepherdesses sift mounds of soap powder into mahogany salad bowls. Overhead, the prog-rock

Jez Butterworth’s new play The Ferryman is set in Armagh in 1981. Quinn, a former terrorist, has swapped the armed struggle for a farming career and now lives with his sick wife, their countless kids, his sister-in-law and her only son. But the IRA, who murdered his brother as punishment for his disloyalty, are due to pay a visit with unknown intentions. More violence, perhaps? Protection money? Or both. Well, neither, it turns out. They merely want Quinn to refrain from blaming his brother’s death on them. Rather a low price to ask. And yet Quinn is willing to defy them even though he knows they repay disobedience with murder,

Obsession at the Barbican has a complicated provenance. The experimental Belgian director Ivo van Hove adapted the show from a Visconti film based on the novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. This version originated in Amsterdam and was rendered into English by a London playwright. The story mixes surrealism with torrid carnality. Sexy Hannah is married to nasty Joseph, who runs a failing hotel. Hunky Gino (Jude Law) seduces Hannah. Let’s elope, he suggests. No, says Hannah. Gino hangs around the hotel mending a truck engine parked by Joseph in the foyer. Gino gets the engine working and it soars upwards and hovers 30 feet in the air. But even

Left-wing groupie Paul Mason has written a costume drama about the suppression of the Paris commune in 1871. We meet Louise Michel and her all-female gang of arsonists as they’re carted off to jail for setting fire to the Tuileries. After a harsh stint in the cells, they’re shipped out to the French colony of New Caledonia, in the eastern Pacific, where they live in an open prison. Things aren’t too bad. They mingle with the natives, enjoy the local hooch, and sing comradely songs about ‘spilling the blood impure’. Escape is on the agenda. A committee of anarchists is said to be making swift progress across the ocean in