Lloyd Evans is The Spectator's sketch-writer and theatre critic
Kemi Badenoch got tough with Sir Keir Starmer at PMQs. Not tough enough, but at least she led on a decent issue: old folks in distress. She mentioned the Waspi women and then she changed tack, to wrong foot Sir Kier, and threw him a short but specific question. How many new applications for pension
The curse of Macbeth strikes again. David Tennant’s turn as the Scottish psychopath was interrupted this week by a kerfuffle in the auditorium at the Harold Pinter theatre. A play-goer left to visit the lavatory and took exception when the ushers asked him to wait for a suitable pause before resuming his seat. Audience members
The Devil Wears Prada is a fairy tale about an aspiring female novelist, Andy, who receives a job offer from Runway, the nastiest and most influential fashion magazine in America. Miranda, the editor, is a Botoxed uber-bitch who doesn’t really want to hire Andy, but does anyway. And Andy doesn’t really want to work in
Flunked it again, unfortunately. Kemi Badenoch chose poor tactics at PMQs. She made flabby speeches instead of hitting the PM with short, sharp questions. She led on immigration – one of the Tories’ weakest topics. Sir Keir Starmer immediately mentioned the ‘open border’ policies that allowed nearly a million migrants to arrive in a single
Expendable, at the Royal Court, is an urgent bulletin from the front line of the grooming gang scandal in the north of England. The setting is a kitchen in Yorkshire where Zara is trying to keep her family together after her son, Raheel, was outed as a rape suspect by a national newspaper. White thugs
Labour thinks it can win on immigration. Their new strategy was road-tested today at PMQs as backbencher Olivia Bailey opened the session saluting Keir Starmer’s gang-busting policies. ‘Internationalist co-operation, shared intelligence and joint law enforcement,’ said Bailey, ‘are the best way to end the vile people-smuggling trade.’ Starmer rose to agree with his stooge.
A slice of the ghetto arrives at the Kiln Theatre in Kilburn. The Purists is set on the stoop of a crumbling block in Queens, New York, and the show declares its urban credentials as a boombox slams out a hip-hop rhythm and Mr Bugz, a DJ, enters, mike in hand. He urges the audience
Third time lucky for Kemi Badenoch. The Tory leader’s first two attempts to crush Keir Starmer at PMQs failed. Today she began by attacking the chancellor whose career is in quicksand and who admitted to the CBI that her smash-and-grab budget was so destructive that it mustn’t be repeated. ‘I’m not coming back for more
‘Good for you. Amazing. I should do the same.’ ‘You must feel great. Lucky you.’ This is what I hear when I tell people I haven’t touched alcohol for a year or more. Behind their bland words, I detect an air of pity and bafflement, even a hint of contempt. I know what they’re thinking
It was deputies’ day at PMQs. Sir Keir Starmer is busy flying around the world yet again. This time he’s trying to charm the unlucky leaders of the G20. Angela Rayner took his place at PMQs opposite Alex Burghart for the Tories. His opener was terse and effective. ‘What is the government doing to bring
Going for Gold is a biographical drama about a forgotten star of the 1970s. Frankie Lucas was a middleweight boxing champion, born on the Caribbean island of St Vincent, who won a gold medal at the Commonwealth Games in 1972. Although he lived in London he wasn’t picked for the England team and instead he
Cold drizzle falling on tweed. That was the abiding image of today’s protest in Westminster which filled Whitehall with tens of thousands of indignant farmers. Just two tractors were admitted. One was parked outside Downing Street and the other stood by the women’s war memorial. Groups of farmers clambered onto the metal flanks and took
PMQs under Sir Keir’s premiership is less entertaining and volatile than before. Blame the landslide. A huge government majority fills the backbenches with half-witted placemen and wonks who have no experience of public speaking. They can’t command the attention of a large crowd. They don’t look the audience in the eye. And they fail to
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button carries a strap-line, ‘an unordinary musical’. Perhaps the word ‘extraordinary’ is simply too banal to capture the outstanding qualities of this unique show. The year is 1918 and a miraculous birth occurs in a remote Cornish fishing village. The newborn is not a baby but an adult pensioner, Benjamin,
Slightly childish and she didn’t win. That’s how Kemi Badenoch fared during her first bust-up with Sir Keir Starmer at PMQs. She began with a snippy reaction to his gag about the Tory party’s penchant for changing its commander-in-chief. Sir Keir said that Kemi was the fourth leader he’d faced in less than five years.
How To Survive Your Mother is a play based on a memoir by political dramatist Jonathan Maitland. He portrays himself in the show, and he muses on the wisdom of turning his manipulative, devious, sex-mad mother into a dramatic heroine. In the end, he’s swayed by ‘Edinburgh derangement syndrome’ as he calls it. ‘You’re diagnosed
The Tories lied! That was the thrust of Rachel Reeves’s first Budget today. She was very specific about the falsehoods. At the time of the spring financial forecast, she said, ‘they hid the reality of their public spending plans.’ Parliament and the public were the victims of ‘a cover up’ about pressures on our economy.
Stanley Kubrick’s surreal movie Dr Strangelove is a response to the fear of nuclear annihilation which obsessed every citizen in the western world from the end of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The play’s co-adaptors, Sean Foley and Armando Iannucci, are old enough to recall
‘The battle of the gingers.’ That’s how Angela Rayner described her tussle with Oliver Dowden at deputy prime minister’s questions today. But it was a cosy chat rather than a vicious duel. Dowden probed Labour’s plan to fleece businesses by raising employers’ National Insurance contributions. Rayner disregarded the issue and drawled out a reply using
The Duchess [of Malfi] has been partially updated by Zinnie Harris in a puzzling modern-dress production. The set by Tom Piper resembles a concrete bunker in an abandoned apartment block and Ben Ormerod’s lighting throws weird shadows across the playing area, which seems to consist mostly of discarded plywood sheets. It feels like a scout-hut