Theatre

The unstoppable rise of stage amplification

Recent acquisition of some insanely expensive hearing aids aimed at helping me out in cacophonous restaurants has set me thinking about the extent that modern life allows us to filter our intake of noise. This is big business. As sirens wail and Marvel blockbusters and rock concerts crash through legal decibel levels, controlling sound levels has become an increasingly sophisticated operation, abetted by everything from silicone pastilles and the volume-control knob to the wireless earbud. The National Theatre has virtually given up on ‘natural’ sound Concert halls and opera houses remain havens of what one might call ‘natural’ acoustics, places where the alchemy of balancing convex and concave surfaces with

Lloyd Evans

Artistically embarrassing but a hit: Shifters, at Duke of York’s Theatre, reviewed

Shifters has transferred to the West End from the Bush Theatre. It opens at a granny’s funeral attended by the grief-stricken Dre, aged 32. Dre was raised by his ‘Nana’ as he calls her – rhyming it with ‘spanner’ – and he weeps when he realises that his mother has failed to show up. A beautiful young woman arrives unexpectedly. This is Dre’s teenage sweetheart and they exchange gossip over a glass of whisky while rummaging through Nana’s belongings. The press night crowd adored these flawless yuppies. An artistic embarrassment but a sure-fire hit The lovebirds met at school where they studied philosophy and outshone all their rivals in the

The cast mistake screaming for comedy: Cockfosters, at Turbine Theatre, reviewed

The Turbine Theatre is a newish venue beneath the railway arches of Grosvenor Bridge in Battersea. The comfy auditorium is furnished with 94 cinema seats and the only snag is the scent of mildew clinging to the plasterwork. Overhead, the rumbling commuter trains create the perfect soundscape for Cockfosters, a zany rom-com set on the Tube. Two travellers meet by accident on a Piccadilly line service departing from Heathrow Terminal 3. James is a nerdy public-school reject who spots a fellow traveller, Victoria, struggling to shift three monster suitcases onto the train. Obeying Tube etiquette, he makes no attempt to help her and they sit in adjoining seats without acknowledging

This Edinburgh Fringe comedian is headed for stardom

Dr Phil Hammond is a hilarious and wildly successful comedian whose career is built on the ruins of the NHS. His act has spawned a host of imitators on the stand up-circuit and they share Dr Phil’s confused adoration for the NHS. All of them love the idea of universal healthcare but they dislike the messy practical details. And they’re convinced that extra cash will save the system. The evidence suggests otherwise; handing more money to the NHS is like giving a gambling addict the keys to a bullion van. The gallows humour is delightful if you’re not stuck in an NHS queue Dr Phil claims that he would gladly

Edinburgh has turned into a therapy session

Therapy seems to be the defining theme of this year’s Edinburgh festival. Many performers are saddled with personal demons or anxieties which they want to alleviate by yelling about them in front of a paying audience. Professor Tanya Byron puts it like this in the Pleasance brochure: ‘Therapy is where art and story-telling combine.’ This show crashes and burns like the stock market on a bad day. A cheerier ending might help. At the Pleasance, Joe Sellman-Leava is seeking catharsis through his show It’s The Economy, Stupid! (Jack Dome, until 26 August). He begins by delivering a friendly lecture about credit, interest rates, retail banks, Adam Smith and so on.

Reinforces the caricatures it sets out to diminish: Slave Play, at the Noël Coward Theatre, reviewed

Slave Play is a series of hoaxes. The producers announced that ‘Black Out’ performances would be reserved for ‘black-identifying’ playgoers but the ticketing system is colour-blind and these so-called ‘segregated’ shows were attended by audiences of all ethnicities. The PR gambit generated lots of free publicity, but these stunts don’t always translate into ticket sales. The second hour involves screeds of impenetrable psychobabble as the couples bicker and moan The show appears to be a drama set in the Deep South before the American civil war. It opens with a white farmer humiliating his black cleaner, who easily outsmarts him. When he forces her to eat fruit from the dirty

Why Sir Arthur Conan Doyle believed in fairies

Sherlock Holmes fans will be delighted to know that there is a new play featuring the great man. In it Holmes, 72, bored silly by retirement and bee-keeping in the Sussex Downs, is back living at his old haunt of 221B Baker Street and  reunited with the widowed Watson. The case that lands in Holmes’s lap concerns a reported outbreak of fairies in the Bradford area. Thus we are plunged into the Cottingley saga, a mystery that fascinated the public in the 1920s. The play is by Fiona Maher, a fairy-lore expert, organiser of the Legendary Llangollen Faery Festival (she’s known as Tink) and author of a very well-researched book

Lloyd Evans

Shapeless and facile: The Hot Wing King, at the Dorfman Theatre, reviewed

Our subsidised theatres often import shows from the US without asking whether our theatrical tastes align with America’s. The latest arrival, The Hot Wing King, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning play about unhealthy eating. The production opens in a luxury house in Memphis, occupied, rather strangely, by four gay men who dress gracelessly in cheap, flashy designer gear. They behave like overgrown babies and spend their time leaping about the place, bickering and bantering, singing songs, performing dance moves and exchanging cuddles. This cameo repeats the caricature of the foolish African crook. Why is the Globe perpetuating racial bigotry? One of the four man-babies wears a business suit and calls himself

Vapid and pretentious: Visit From An Unknown Woman, at Hampstead Theatre, reviewed

Visit From An Unknown Woman, adapted by Christopher Hampton from a short story by Stefan Zweig, opens like an episode of Seinfeld. A playboy writer enjoys a fling with a black-clad beauty – but when he kisses her goodbye, he can’t remember her name. It feels like a set-up for a gag, but the script is very short of jokes. A year passes and the mysterious beauty, named Marianne, returns to the playboy’s pad and delivers a series of astonishing revelations. At this point, the show turns into a memory play as Marianne starts to yammer about her childhood, her family struggles and a mass of other details which sound

Unmissable – for professors of gender studies: Alma Mater, at the Almeida Theatre, reviewed

Alma Mater is a topical melodrama set on a university campus. The new principal, Jo, (amusingly played by Justine Mitchell) is a radical feminist who recalls the bitter struggles of the 1980s when she strove to put women on an equal footing with men. Her task now is to address the college’s reputation for ‘binge-drinking, partying and casual sex’. To ingratiate herself with the students she makes a speech full of swear words which greatly impresses the first years, apparently. Then a nightmare unfolds. A naive Welsh fresher, Paige, attends a fancy dress party where she’s sexually assaulted by a handsome older student. Drink was involved. Paige admits that she

Morally repugnant: Boys From the Blackstuff, at the Garrick Theatre, reviewed

Yosser Hughes is regarded as a national treasure. He first appeared in 1982 in Alan Bleasdale’s TV drama, Boys from the Blackstuff, which followed a crew of Liverpool workers who lay tarmac (‘black stuff’) for a living. When their contract expires the lads are left shocked and helpless even though job security is not a perk of their profession. The atmosphere of the show, adapted by James Graham, may come as a surprise to those who know Yosser by reputation only. Far from being a worker’s champion, Yosser is a crook, a hypocrite and a class-traitor. He and his friends moonlight for cash while claiming state benefits, which are, of

‘Punishingly dull – but the crowd loved it’: Next to Normal, at Wyndham’s Theatre, reviewed

The Constituent is a larky show about violence against female politicians. A strange subject for a comedy. Anna Maxwell Martin plays a vapid but well-meaning MP, Monica, who receives unwelcome attention from a sinister dropout, named Alec (played by James Corden). Alec’s backstory is quite a puzzle. He used to work as an MI6 spymaster in Afghanistan, where he persuaded senior Taliban commanders to operate as double agents. While off-duty he seduced an NHS ward sister who happened to be nursing soldiers on the battlefield in Kandahar. If you want a celebration of spineless masculinity, look no further That, at least, is the story he gives Monica. Alec says he

Riveting and exhilarating: Miss Julie, at Park90, reviewed

Some Demon by Laura Waldren is a gem of a play that examines the techniques of manipulation and bullying practised by shrinks on anorexics. The setting is an NHS referral unit where Sam, an 18-year-old philosophy student, arrives with a minor eating disorder. Like every patient, Sam is told that her personality is immersed in a civil war and that two implacable forces – the ‘diseased self’ and the ‘whole self’ – are fighting for control of her destiny. It’s a brilliantly simple trick that any bully can learn in a few minutes. If the patient says something unwelcome, the shrink ascribes the statement to the ‘diseased self’ and adds:

Hard to get to grips with: Marie Curie: The Musical reviewed

Marie Curie: The Musical is a history lesson combined with a chemistry seminar and it’s aimed at indignant feminists who want to agonise afresh over the wrongs of yesteryear. We meet the young Marie, wearing her signature widow’s frock, as she speeds towards Paris on a train from Poland. The essential materials of this musical are hard to get to grips with; the characters stiff, the tunes so-so This opening scene is positively trembling with significant detail. Her fellow passenger, Sarah, is an impoverished Pole who has rejected the advances of a wealthy swineherd and decided to take a job at a Parisian glassworks. Her plan is to save all

An exclusive look at Graham Linehan’s Father Ted musical

The tree-lined streets of Rotherhithe are an odd place to unveil a West End musical. But this is a suitably odd situation. Graham Linehan – lauded comedy writer turned culture warrior – is about to unveil what he calls ‘a musical that may never be seen’. For much of the past 30 years, the idea of turning Father Ted, cult sitcom of the 1990s, into a West End musical would have seemed a hot prospect – certainly to the legions of nerdy, largely male fans who still stream episodes decades later. Once upon a time, it looked destined for Shaftesbury Avenue, backed by one of the biggest names in theatre.

Lloyd Evans

Amazingly sloppy: Romeo & Juliet, at Duke of York’s Theatre, reviewed

Romeo & Juliet is Shakespeare with power cuts. The lighting in Jamie Lloyd’s cheerless production keeps shutting down, perhaps deliberately. The show stars Tom Holland (also known as Spider-Man) whose home in Verona resembles a sound studio that’s just been burgled. There’s nothing in it apart from a few microphones on metal stands. He and his mates, all dressed in hoodies and black jeans, deliver their lines without feeling or energy as if recording the text for an audiobook. Some of them appear to misunderstand the verse. Shakespeare’s most thrilling romance has been turned into a sexless bore When not muttering their lines they stare accusingly into the middle distance,

Headed for the canon: Withnail and I, at the Birmingham Rep, reviewed

After nearly 40 years, Withnail has arrived on stage. Sean Foley directs Bruce Robinson’s adaptation, which starts with a live rock-band thumping out a few 1960s hits. The musicians take cameo roles as maids and coppers. The show needs a larger cast especially for the tea-room scene – ‘We want the finest wines available to humanity’ – which calls for a big crowd of crumbling old crocks. Never mind. The production would have thrilled diehard fans. As for newcomers, they would probably have been better to start with the film. This production of Withnail would have thrilled diehard fans – newcomers less so Robert Sheehan delivers a glitzy, karaoke version

Fawlty Towers – The Play is the best museum piece you’ll ever see

Fawlty Towers at the Apollo may be the best museum piece you’ll ever see. A full-length play has been carved out of three episodes: ‘The Hotel Inspectors’, ‘The Germans’, and ‘Communication Problems’ in which the deaf guest, Mrs Richards, made a nuisance of herself by refusing to switch on her hearing aid in case the batteries ran out. For anyone who saw the sitcom in the 1970s, this is a pleasantly weird show. It’s like returning to a seaside funfair after half a century and finding all the rides unchanged and the staff more or less as you remember them. If Beckett had written family comedies he might have created

Minority Report is superficial pap – why on earth stage it?

Minority Report is a plodding bit of sci-fi based on a Steven Spielberg movie made more than two decades ago. The setting is London, 2050, and every citizen has been implanted with an undetectably tiny neuroscanner which informs the cops about crimes before they’ve been committed. However, as the first scene reveals, the undetectably tiny neuroscanner can be removed from the flesh with a corkscrew. The character who gouges out her tag is a computer geek, Julia, who invented the surveillance method in the first place. She stands accused of planning a murder and she goes on the run to clear her name. The actors appear to be trapped inside

Four female writers at the court of Elizabeth I

Almost a century ago, in A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf claimed that if William Shakespeare had had an equally talented sister the obstacles to her sharing his vocation would have been insurmountable. Woolf’s argument that a woman needs ‘money and a room of her own’ in order to write proved persuasive. ‘Shakespeare’s sister’ has become a pop-cultural trope. So perhaps it’s unsurprising that the distinguished American scholar of the Renaissance Ramie Targoff should borrow the phrase for a study of four woman writers. Her title offers a shortcut to understanding how significant this immensely accomplished quartet is for readers and writers today. Not that Targoff’s elegantly readable, immaculately