Theatre

The Emperor seems like a worthy lesson in Ethiopian history. Haile Selassie’s final days are recounted by a retinue of devoted flunkies. He had valets, chauffeurs, zoo-keepers and door-openers to perform every conceivable chore. Each morning a butler proffered a silver dish loaded with meat from which the emperor fed his exotic pets. A clock-watcher, ‘the Cuckoo’, performed a coded bow during meetings to inform His Majesty that new suppliants awaited him. A royal bursar helped him hand envelopes of cash to petitioners who discovered, always too late, that the donation was barely a fraction of the sum expected. A cushion-handler ensured that his titchy legs were never seen to

Coleridge deemed the narrative structure of The Alchemist perfect. But, I wonder. A landowner quits plague-ridden London and his cunning servants pose as learned sages in order to defraud affluent locals. Ben Jonson’s plotting is certainly adroit. The action takes place in a single location within the span of an afternoon, and this concentration of forces may have appealed to Coleridge’s idea of classical purity. What Jonson’s narrative doesn’t explain is why so many dim-witted toffs are kicking around in a city abandoned by all but its poorest inhabitants. His characters’ names crassly signal their roles: Surly, Dapper, Lovewit, Sir Epicure Mammon. The chief villains, Subtle and Face, are assisted

Kenneth Branagh’s obsession with Larry Olivier’s career is becoming such a bizarre act of theatrical necromancy that it deserves to be turned into a drama. Sir Ken and Lord Olivier could be played by the same actor. The Entertainer, written for Larry in 1956 by John Osborne, presents us with a washed-up music-hall star, Archie Rice, who is supposed to symbolise Britain’s post-colonial decline. This version, directed by Rob Ashford, opens with a tap-dancing routine so ponderously executed that it leaves one wondering if Branagh is a lousy hoofer trying too hard, or a master of the art impersonating a lesser practitioner. This difficulty permeates the piece. By making the

‘Many people are mourning,’ said Sam West on a BBC panel show discussing the response of the arts world to Brexit. According to West’s figures, ‘96 per cent of those polled were for Remain. Collaboration and connection are our bread and butter.’ The atmosphere of bitterness and anger was palpable at the Edinburgh Festival. I spent four days immersed in comedy shows and I heard only one pro-Brexit gag. The excellent Geoff Norcott said he was puzzled to meet Remainers who told him the result had been swung by ‘thick’ Leave voters. ‘Thick?’ he said. ‘The Remain campaign waited until after 23 June to stage their street protest.’ Lloyd Evans

Walking along the Brighton seafront, I was struck by posters advertising endless tribute acts; among them Suspiciously Elvis, the Small Fakers and The Kinx. The Edinburgh Fringe is much the same. Shows this summer include Dirty Harry: The Ultimate Tribute to Blondie and Billie Holliday: Tribute to the Iconic Lady Day. Or how about Gary Bland’s Mr Romantic: A Tribute to Johnny Mathis — ‘an insight into Mathis’s career, and how Mathis’s music has been a big part of Gary’s life through love, heartache and laughter’. The theatre at Edinburgh, too, is full of remakes. Fancy Dan Choo-Park’s The Song of Beast (after Hamlet), where the Prince of Denmark is teleported to

Consider it commercially. So powerful is the pull of the Potter franchise that the characters could simply re-enact the plot of ‘Incy-Wincy Spider’ and the fans would swoon with joy. The stage show has been written by a two-man committee, Jack Thorne and John Tiffany, with the help of billionaire equality campaigner J.K. Rowling. Harry is now 37 and working as a Whitehall clodhopper at the Ministry of Magic. He’s troubled by his stompy bed-wetter of a son, Albus, whose tantrums cause the middle-aged miracle-worker to suffer agonies of weepy self-doubt. Together they visit Hogwarts and the multifarious plotlines start to punch each other in the face. Three kids —

An inspired decision to stage Jesus Christ Superstar in a summer theatre in Regent’s Park. The action takes place outdoors, in balmy climes, so the atmosphere is ideal for Rice and Lloyd Webber’s finest show. The songbook bursts with melodic inventiveness, and the score blithely rips apart the conventions of musical theatre and remakes them afresh. Lloyd Webber finds two contemporary registers and switches between them constantly: first the eerie, unhinged menace of late-1960s heavy rock, and secondly the sweet, escapist loveliness of 1970s pop. The transitions from blunt savagery to pure sugar sometimes occur with gunshot abruptness, on a single note. Tim Rice’s lyrical complexity and dramatic assurance are

Fracking is a British tradition. Since 1969 more than 200 sites have used hydraulic fracturing ‘without environmental catastrophes’ according to Dick Selley, an emeritus professor of geology, writing in the programme notes to Fracked! by Alistair Beaton. The satire takes the opposite view and regards fracking as a wicked novelty inflicted on rustic innocents by Big Oil, which hopes to steep the country’s aquifers with radioactive water and massacre all its customers at the same time. That’s the business plan, apparently. We meet a pootling granny (Anne Reid), who reluctantly leads a campaign to stop Deerland Energy from plastering southern England with horrible drilling platforms. Deerland hires a firm of

Does anyone believe Brian Friel’s libellous blarney? He portrays Ireland in the 20th century as an economic basket case where the starving, the retarded, the crippled and the widowed offer up prayers to a heartless God who responds by heaping their burden ever higher. Friel is popular with British mainlanders who are tickled by the news that their Atlantic coastlines are peopled by picturesque barbarians and suicidal drunkards mired in exquisitely revolting dereliction. You’ll notice that aid agencies use the same technique, and for the same audience, when they portray Africa as a rough and ready paradise where life is organised around the latest borehole dug by a team of

Mike Bartlett’s curious blank-verse drama Charles III became an international hit. His new effort examines the cut-throat world of dark-web espionage. An American traitor named Andrew (Edward Snowden presumably) is hiding out in a Moscow hotel. Enter a flirty, giggling Irishwoman played by Caoilfhionn Dunne, who claims to be British and who teases Andrew over his betrayal of his homeland’s secrets. She evinces an interest in Oscar Wilde and the pair lock horns over footling minutiae. Andrew points out that Barbie dolls are called Sindy in the UK and this seems to demonstrate his familiarity with Britain. But he fails to spot the false cadences of her accent and he

When Richard III’s bones were unearthed in a Leicester car park, Frankie Boyle suggested the headline ‘Bent royal found at dogging hotspot’. Rupert Goold opens his version of the play by restaging the 2012 excavation as if to inform us that the past and the future are held together by something called time. That glib gesture apart, this is a superb production whose modern-dress aesthetic works, just for once, extremely well. And it works because the costumes are dark, sober and unornamented and this visual restraint moves our attention upwards to the more fertile arena of the face. And what a face Ralph Fiennes has, all meat-cleaver and calculation: the

Gauche, perhaps, to complain about Aladdin but it slightly deserves it. The terrific Genie opens the show and then disappears for 45 minutes while the plot is explained. My squirmy ten-year-old kept whispering Aladdin-related trivia at me in order to occupy himself as the rags-to-riches storyline was laid out in far too much detail. Visually the show is impressive, despite minor flaws. The rangy architectural sets are intricate confections of teetering filigree but they look a little factory-fresh and unlived-in. Behind them the daylight skies are wrongly composed of a single hue (only the night sky has a single hue). Aladdin is played by Dean John-Wilson, a cocky slab of

Bertolt Brecht took The Threepenny Opera  from an 18th-century script by John Gay and relocated it to Victorian London. This National Theatre version wants to straddle the contemporary and the antique. Mack the Knife, an Afghan war veteran who murders strangers, contracts a bigamous marriage with Polly Peachum, the daughter of a cross-dressing mastermind who runs begging gangs across east London. This laborious set-up takes an hour to establish and the drama gets started only when Polly’s mum vows to rub out Mack at a knocking-shop. A wise dramatist would have placed this threat in the opening scene. But Brecht isn’t a wise dramatist; he’s a preachy one and his

Isabelle Huppert does nothing by halves. And she doesn’t, I think, care greatly for journalists. She expects them to ask stupid questions. Sitting before me in an airless room in the eaves of Paris’s Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, she is tiny, dressed entirely in black and more or less unsmiling. Lily-skinned, red-haired, and with a fabulous curl in her upper lip, she’s appeared in more than 100 film and TV productions. Ninety minutes after our meeting, she will be on stage. I sense she wants this interview over fast. But at the start she makes me, I must report, comatose with wonder. I have adored Mme Huppert on screen for three