Culture

Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

Lloyd Evans

British empire? What British empire?

Theatre

Here’s a tip for play-goers. When the curtain goes up on a garden, prepare for some feeble plotting. The glory of gardens, for the playwright, is that the characters can enter and leave without reason. The rites of welcome and valediction, the physical opening and shutting of doors, the declaration of motive are all abandoned.

David Tennant plays Richard II like a casual hippie

Theatre

Gregory Doran, now in command at Stratford in succession to Sir Michael Boyd, launches his regime with Richard II, intending to stage the complete Shakespearean canon over the next six years, ‘making every play an event’. What’s really good is that the plays will also be seen on tour, in London, online and ‘live on

Lloyd Evans

Toffs rule! 

Theatre

This is a strange one. Simon Paisley Day’s new play feels like a conventional comedy of manners. Three couples pitch up at a Welsh cottage for a relaxing weekend away from the kiddies. Trouble erupts instantly. Keith and Briony bicker over the milk that the swollen-breasted Briony has to express into plastic bottles. Keith secretly

Lloyd Evans

The Light Princess badly needs a mission

Theatre

There are many pleasures in The Light Princess, a new musical by Tori Amos. George MacDonald’s fairy story introduces us to a beautiful red-haired royal, Althea (Rosalie Craig), who has a mysterious resistance to gravity. After various tribulations she abandons life on dry land and becomes a mermaid. The show meets these technical challenges with

Lloyd Evans

An audience with the Queen and Mrs Thatcher

Theatre

A feast of pleasures, and some annoyances, at the Trike. Handbagged, by Moira Buffini, is a fictional account of the weekly audiences between Mrs Thatcher and the Queen. The staging is extremely odd. Buffini gives monarch and prime minister two impersonators each. This enables us to trace the minor developments in hair colour and frock

Lloyd Evans

The peril with Brecht is that he will always be Brecht

Theatre

Brecht in the West End? Quite a rarity. Jonathan Church’s zippy and stylish version of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui arrives from the Chichester Festival garlanded with plaudits. Brecht’s wartime allegory was intended as a warning to America that its idolisation of gangsters made it vulnerable to a fascist takeover. Ui begins as a

Lloyd Evans

Barking in Essex: a hit with hen-night hysterics

Theatre

How appropriate. Barking in Essex, a farce about gangsters, has been dishonestly billed as ‘a new comedy’. The script was written in 2005 by Clive Exton (1930–2007), who pre-dates Woody Allen by half a decade. The storyline — thieves quarrel over stolen loot — is a trusty antique featured in ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’ and in

Lloyd Evans

Hysteria is a pile-up of unmotivated absurdities

Theatre

Terry Johnson’s acclaimed farce Hysteria opens in Sigmund Freud’s Hampstead home in 1938. The godfather of psychobabble is ambushed by a beautiful maniac named Jessica, who forces him to analyse her, and then hides in his closet and strips naked. Along comes Freud’s old chum Yahuda, a bumbling twerp who doubles as the farce’s authority

Mark Ravenhill’s take on Voltaire’s Candide

Theatre

Ah yes, Candide, the adventures of an innocent abroad in ‘the best of all possible worlds’, as philosophers of the 18th century liked to insist. Voltaire’s satirical demolition of the higher nonsense of his age, and of the powers of Church and state who propped themselves up with it. A novel of 1759 written, at

Lloyd Evans

Theatre review: Fleabag’s scandalous success

Theatre

Suddenly they’re all at it. Actors, that is, writing plays. David Haig, Rory Kinnear and Simon Paisley Day are all poised to offer new dramas to the public. But someone else has got there first. You may have spotted Phoebe Waller-Bridge playing a secretarial cameo in The Iron Lady. She’s a rangy Home Countries brunette

Lloyd Evans

Chimerica is a triumph

Theatre

Chimerica. The weird title of Lucy Kirkwood’s hit play conjoins the names of the eastern and western superpowers and promises to offer a snapshot of both nations just as the baton of economic primacy passes from America’s wizened youth to China’s reborn antiquity. The script has an unusually complex set of creative ambitions. It takes

Lloyd Evans

Henry Goodman interview: How to make Brecht fun

Theatre

The face is unlined. The tan is as deep as Brazilian hardwood. The thatch of grey hair looks like a gift from God rather than the achievement of surgical intervention. At 63, the actor Henry Goodman keeps himself in excellent trim. He exudes energy and concentration, and in the hour we spend together, he relates

Lloyd Evans

Completely Gar-Gar

Theatre

Irish playwright Brian Friel has built a formidable reputation out of very slender materials. A couple of international hits and a handful of Chekhov translations have won him a mountain of trophies. He’s still best known for his 1990 turbo-weepy Dancing at Lughnasa, which featured five mad Irish birds stuck in the bog with no

Lloyd Evans

The best satire at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Theatre

Politics is everywhere in Edinburgh. It’s embedded in the architecture of the streets. The New Town, built in the latter half of the 18th century, is a granite endorsement of the Act of Union, a stone pledge of loyalty to Britain’s new Germanic monarchy in London. The layout forms an oblong grid. The horizontals of

Lloyd Evans

Crash-for-cash scam at the Donmar

Theatre

High summer and it’s blockbuster time. The Donmar’s latest show is by the acclaimed Nick Payne, whose play about string theory, Constellations, wowed the West End last year. Constellations niftily incorporated its subject matter into its formal structure. What does that mean? It means the storylines multiplied like an exploding atom until an infinite number

Lloyd Evans

Thwarted love between geriatrics

Theatre

This is brilliant. The new play by Oliver Cotton, a 69-year-old actor, is set in New York in 1986. An ageing couple, Joe and Ellie, are practising their ballroom dancing when Joe’s maverick brother Billy comes crashing through the front door. The cops are after him. He was holed up in a Florida hotel when

Lloyd Evans

A cast of celebs fails to bring any oomph to The Ladykillers

Theatre

The Ladykillers is back. Sean Foley’s adaptation of the classic Ealing comedy introduces us to a crew of villains who stage a train heist while lodging in the house of a sweet old lady. She discovers their crime and when they try to bump her off she proves indestructible. The 1955 movie makes a huge

A Mad World, My Masters: the funniest play in Stratford in a long while

Theatre

It’s hard to say anything about this uproarious show without falling into the appalling sexual wordplay which besmirches Sean Foley and Phil Porter’s version of A Mad World, My Masters, Thomas Middleton’s satiric comedy of 1605. Putting in its first ever appearance on a Stratford stage, Middleton’s play, as written, is itself as cornucopian a