Theatre

A knockout show at the Young Vic. Literally. The stage has been reconfigured as a boxing ring to make Mike Bartlett’s play, Bull, feel like a sporting fixture. This is a common conceit, even a cliché, but here it’s done superbly. The auditorium floor is squash-club yellow and the stage is surrounded by a casual standing area that creates the ragged informal atmosphere of a training arena. Excellent stuff. The play is a wordy, tricky, shifty, nasty, faithless thing. The characters lie about their backgrounds so it’s hard to know who, or what, to latch on to. More problematically the plot is infertile. Nothing grows or develops. At curtain-fall the

A new year must start with hope and resolution, and if you’re very rich, with influence in the highest places, I’d urge you to resolve to dust off the private jet and get to Paris quick this weekend hoping to find a ticket somehow for the last Châtelet performances of An American in Paris, Christopher Wheeldon’s s’wonderful, s’marvellous new staging of the Gershwin/Minnelli musical film. Or book for New York in March when the show moves to its second home on Broadway. But surely there must be a UK run soon. It’s the first big dance-musical of the Royal Ballet’s favourite son, which is why we should pay attention. The

1. The play of the year, by a mile, was Fathers and Sons at the Donmar adapted from Turgenev’s novel. Lindsey Turner directed Brian Friel’s harrowing and exhilarating script with immense visual aplomb. 2. Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be Lionel Bart’s first musical was a sublimely witty look at the Cockney underworld starring Gary Kemp. 3. The Realness A new song-and-dance comedy at Hackney Downs Studio, approached the same material as Fings but with a punchier and more contemporary style. 4. I Can’t Sing! The exhilarating title melody of this musical set my nape tingling with static electricity and I was convinced that Harry Hill’s X-Factor spoof would stick around

Janet Suzman’s throwaway comment about the theatre being ‘a white invention’ has attracted a storm of opportunistic derision. What Dame Janet may have meant was this. Theatre is gossip ceremonially presented. And the dramatic structures devised by the Athenians in the 5th century BC raised the form to such a pitch of excellence that the offspring cultures of Ancient Greece acquired a head start that has never been relinquished. A harmless footnote. But her timing was unlucky. A day earlier the head of Arts Council England, Peter Bazalgette, ordered the 670 arts bodies he supports to get their skates on and make a bigger push for ‘diversity’. He announced a ‘Creative

A couple of nights ago a question arose in our post-show discussion. It is a question I am familiar with. I run Theatre Uncut. We commission writers to create short plays that explore social or political issues. We then release these plays, rights free, to be performed by anyone anywhere for a limited period and stage them in leading theatres across the country. So far this year 328 groups in 25 countries have downloaded the plays. While we don’t advertise our own political persuasion it is pretty obvious to which side we lean: we were set up in response to the cuts. We use the word ‘social’ believing that society

‘It’s not as bad as I thought it would be,’ said Norman Mailer to his wife, Norris Church, after reading the first chapters of a novel she wrote in the 1970s. It took her decades to recover from this accolade and the book remained unpublished until 2000. Here’s a two-handed drama she drafted in the 1980s. The setting is a New York strip joint. A social anthropologist finds a girl in a booth and hires her to describe her daily life. He feeds her banknotes through a slot, like a zoo-keeper giving peanuts to a caged marmoset, and she prattles away at him earning a dollar every 60 seconds. She

Jonah and Otto is a lost-soul melodrama that keeps its audience guessing. Where are we? The Channel coast somewhere. Indoors or out? Not sure. Near a church maybe? Violence barges in. Jonah, a mouthy scruff, shoves a knife in the face of Otto, a dignified old gent with Big Ears whiskers and a dark, elegant suit. This strange assault is followed by further peculiarities. Rather than calling the cops, Otto seeks a rapprochement with Jonah and they start a rambling, off-beat friendship. Later we discover that Otto, a Cambridge-educated vicar, has an adult daughter who was crippled in childhood by a road accident, and this detail lends credibility to his

You have to hand it to the Russians. They beat us into space, beat us to sexual equality, and a small display of early Soviet avant-garde theatre and film design, tucked away in the V&A’s ‘Performance’ area, proves that they beat us hollow in matters of the dressing-up box too. When you arrive (that is, if you arrive — it is a labyrinthine trek to find it) at Russian Avant-Garde Theatre, you should make straight for the little screen. It shows the amazing 1924 sci-fi film Aelita, in which an engineer living under ‘Military Communism’ builds a spaceship and flies to Mars where he falls for Aelita, Queen of Martians.