Theatre

Alan Bennett’s new play, Allelujah!, is an NHS drama set in a friendly hospital in rural Yorkshire. Colin, an ambitious local boy turned metropolitan yuppie, has arrived from London to visit his sick father and he takes the opportunity to assess the efficiency of the hospital on behalf of his bosses at the health department in Whitehall. Meanwhile, a TV crew has found evidence that a staff member is murdering elderly patients to create vacant beds for new arrivals. Bennett’s sentimental adoration of the NHS leads him to misrepresent a couple of political issues. It’s false to suggest that any well-run hospital is bound to be flogged to the commercial

Stefano Massini’s play opens with a man in a frock-coat reaching New York after six weeks at sea. The year is 1844 and young Henry Lehman has just emigrated from Bavaria to make his fortune. He started modestly with a general store in Montgomery, Alabama, serving local farmers. When wildfires destroyed the cotton crop on which the community relied, Lehman’s business ought to have failed but he saw his opportunity. Whatever possessions the farmers had lost they would have to purchase again. From him. He was joined by his brothers, Manny and Mayer, and they invented the profession of brokerage, ‘middle-men’ they called themselves, buying raw cotton from farmers and

The Lieutenant of Inishmore is a knockabout farce set during the Troubles. Like Monty Python’s dead parrot sketch it uses the expiry of a pet to examine human obsessiveness and self-delusion. But it takes two hours rather than three minutes to make its point. We meet a handsome terrorist, Padraic (Aidan Turner), whose adoration of his black cat symbolises his crazed devotion to republicanism. The cat is accidentally run over by Davey, an amiable twerp on a bike, who must find a new cat or face reprisals from the insanely brutal Padraic. Donny, Padraic’s dad, offers to help Davey and they borrow a ginger cat, which they blacken with boot

Listen to the crowd. I often delay passing judgment on a show until the audience delivers its verdict. This is especially true of plays that appeal primarily to women. Genesis Inc. by Jemma Kennedy presents us with two infertile mums. Serena is a clingy worrier whose aloof boyfriend, Jeff, resents forking out thousands for IVF. Bridget, a cocky City power-dresser, is keen to get herself impregnated by her gay best friend. Serena and Bridget don’t meet until the final scene so the play feels like two separate dramas, poorly merged. The fertility clinic, Genesis Inc., is owned by the smarmy Dr Marshall (Harry Enfield). He wants the firm to go

Intriguing word, ‘octoroon’. Does it mean an eight-sided almond-flavoured cakelet? No, it’s a person whose ancestry is one eighth black. New Yorker Branden Jacobs-Jenkins wants to explore this factoid in his farce An Octoroon, which opens with an angry African-American playwright delivering a comic monologue. He tells us a story about ‘my shrink’. Then he tells us that ‘my shrink’ doesn’t exist. Then he talks about ‘my shrink’ again. Right, so is ‘my shrink’ real or not? Obviously the writer doesn’t care. A second dramatist enters, an Irishman, in Victorian costume. This is Dion Boucicault, a 19th-century writer whose comedies were enormously popular in London and on Broadway. Boucicault’s opening

Polly Stenham starts her overhaul of Strindberg’s Miss Julie with the title. She gives the ‘Miss’ a miss and calls it Julie. The wonder of Strindberg is that his characters speak to us with such force, knowingness and candour that they seem to belong to our own era. Modernising the setting destroys the wonder. This is a textbook lesson in how to kill by transplantation. We’re in a London mansion owned by an absent billionaire whose chauffeur, Jean, is casually seduced by a trustafarian coke fiend, Julie, on the night of her 33rd birthday. Julie’s motives are lust, boredom, a need for attention and a perfunctory desire to sabotage Jean’s

The National has made its largest stage available to one of the nation’s smallest talents. If Brian Friel had been born in Dorset rather than in Co. Tyrone he’d have enjoyed an unremarkable career writing episodes of The Archers with the odd stint on Emmer-dale. He’s a champion witterer whose plays lack suspense, pace, depth or spectacle. His characters are constantly and infuriatingly nice to each other. Occasionally they rise to mild irascibility, or a spot of vituperative teasing, but that’s about it. When he needs a crisis he turns to external sources, to destiny or to happenstance, and his plays often end with dreadful sufferings being visited on russet-faced,

A most excellent fellow, Roger Allam. On the stage he brings dignity to all he does, in the noblest traditions of the British theatre. Off it he is a fully paid-up member of the human race, admired by his comrades as a man no less than as an actor. Some mummers, eager to let off steam, occasionally let the side down. Allam is the sort of chap — star and team player — who brings the profession into repute. Three times a winner of an Olivier award, twice for best actor, he is currently to be found on the West End stage in The Moderate Soprano, David Hare’s touching portrait

Describe the Night opens in Poland in 1920 where two Russian soldiers, Isaac and Nikolai, discuss truth and falsehood. Next we’re in Smolensk, 2010, where some strangers scream at each other about a hire car. Next Moscow, 1931 (or 1937 — the surtitles are illegible), where Nikolai, now a top soldier, asks Isaac, now a successful screen-writer, to audition his wife for a movie. Isaac improvises a scene with the wife and then fondles her bottom as they perform a weirdly sexless dance that is supposed to symbolise something, but it’s unclear what because everything that preceded the dance was indecipherable. Then the interval. I looked for enlightenment in the

Nine Night refers to a Jamaican custom that obliges bereaved families to party non-stop for more than a week following the death of a parent. When Gloria expires her relatives arrive from all parts of London and the Caribbean to indulge in a boozy blow-out. Gloria’s daughter Lorraine tussles with her businessman brother, Robert, who wants to stave off bankruptcy by flogging the family home immediately. Their half-sister, Trudy, arrives from Jamaica and collapses in hysterics over her abandonment by Gloria in infancy. Everyone lives in fear of Auntie Maggie, a pious matriarch, who uses a walking stick and whose religious devotion conceals the heart of an emotional despot. Cecilia

Ella Hickson’s last play at the Almeida was a sketch show about oil. Her new effort uses the same episodic format ornamented with ‘meta-textual experimentation’ (i.e. plotless confusion). The central character is a brilliant young female writer who finds that all male theatre directors are boorish cynical greedy philistine racist sex pests. In Sketch One she meets a smarmy monster twice her age who tries to seduce her with the offer of a script commission. Sketch Two is a commentary on Sketch One, which turns out to have been a play within a play. Sketch Three shows the writer cohabiting with a loser who ‘sells football boots’. The loser has

‘Hunt the Flop’, the Royal Court’s bizarre quest for dud plays, has found a candidate for this year’s overall prize. Instructions for Correct Assembly by Thomas Eccleshare is a family satire set in the near future. Plot: suburban parents replace their missing son with a computerised cyborg which malfunctions. That’s it. Were this a pitch for a TV sketch show the producer would say, ‘OK, but then what?’ The answer here is virtually nothing. Early on, the cyborg makes embarrassing political statements and expresses support for Brexit. The parents hastily silence him using a hand-held device that returns him to their dead-safe Guardianista outlook. This gag is extended later when

David Haig’s play Pressure looks at the Scottish meteorologist, James Stagg, who advised Eisenhower about the weather in the week before D-Day. The play works by detaching us from our foreknowledge of events. We’re aware that the landings went off smoothly on 6 June in fine conditions. However, D-Day was originally scheduled for 5 June, and for the preceding month southern England had basked in a prolonged sunny spell. According to Eisenhower’s American meteorologist, this was set to continue. But Stagg believed a storm was about to engulf the channel. Eisenhower trusted Stagg and postponed D-Day. The storm arrived, albeit tardily, which vindicated Stagg who then foresaw a brief period

Ruthless! The Musical is a camp extravaganza about ambitious actors stranded in small-town America. Sylvia St Croix, a pushy agent, visits a super-talented 10-year-old, Tina, and persuades her to audition for Pippi Longstocking in a school play. Tina’s mother fears that stardom may spoil her little girl but Tina is finished with childhood. ‘Time to move on.’ The production feels like a zany Spike Milligan sketch with a garish set and over-the-top costumes. Sylvia is played by Justin Gardiner who swaggers about like a cross-dressing cowboy in a clingy frock and false breasts. The dialogue, which takes cheap shots at bourgeois morality, may not suit all tastes. Try this. Tina