Lloyd Evans is The Spectator's sketch-writer and theatre critic
‘I was very busy. The party was crap. I’m sorry you’re angry. Now leave me alone.’ That was the gist of Boris’s statement about being fined for attending an event in Downing Street to celebrate his birthday. A flustered-looking Prime Minister delivered the Partygate Declaration in a small, wood-panelled room with a nicely-lit painting behind
The NT has rejigged Hamlet for 8- to 12-year-old children. It’s a decent attempt to cover the highlights at a sprint lasting just 90 minutes. A few gripes. The medieval setting is unclear because the courtiers wear matching red and yellow suits, like Butlins entertainers. Why not military costumes? British kids are used to seeing
It’s good of Nicholas Hytner to let Londoners see David Hare’s new play before it travels to Broadway where it belongs. Few Brits will know the subject, Robert Moses, an urban planner of the 1920s who built the roads and bridges that gave New Yorkers access to seaside resorts in Long Island. This is a
Covid is ancient history. And Ukraine has ceased to dominate PMQs. Today, ideological warfare between the parties broke out again. The old politics is back. Sir Keir Starmer accused the Chancellor of fibbing during last week’s bogus budget. Tax hikes had been camouflaged as tax cuts. Boris denied this and praised his Chancellor for delivering
Cock was written by Mike Bartlett in 2009 while he was in Mexico at a drama conference. The title suggests a cockpit where three characters compete for sexual dominance. W, meaning Woman, is a childminder attracted to a gay man, John, who is thick but handsome and deeply involved with M, or Man. W adores
Keith Allen was cast in his latest show by Lady Antonia Fraser. He explains this odd circumstance when we meet during a break in rehearsals for Pinter’s The Homecoming. ‘I was asked if I wanted to do The Caretaker at the Theatre Royal Bath. And I said, “Yeah, I’d love to.” Then I had a
The bean-counters squared up in the Commons today. Chancellor Rishi Sunak delivered a terse spring statement which contained three major bombshells. And he was answered by Labour’s shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, who unfurled a few surprises of her own. Sunak gave an upbeat assessment of Britain’s economy but warned that our growth is about to
Bloody Difficult Women is a documentary drama by the popular journalist Tim Walker, which looks at the similarities between Gina Miller and Theresa May. It’s well known that Walker detests our current prime minister and he refuses even to allow the Johnson name to sully his script. So although Boris was a key player in
Is Boris a Russian agent? That bizarre question occupied most of PMQs where Dominic Raab deputised for the PM while he travels abroad. The issue was raised by Angela Rayner, standing in for Keir Starmer. She said Boris’s friend, Evgeny Lebedev, had been granted a peerage despite warnings from the security services. ‘What she suggests
Shedding a Skin opens with an office nightmare. Myah is a mixed-race employee in a predominantly white firm who gets summoned to the boss’s room for a group photo. The only other workers present are black and they greet each other with the ‘black nod’ as she calls it. And the group includes a black
Blood streams through Ukraine. Tears run through parliament. At PMQs today, numerous members urged Boris to show more compassion towards Ukraine’s refugees. Poland has already taken 1.2 million. Barely a thousand have been received here, as Boris confirmed, but the number will rise sharply. Leading the pro-refugee campaign was the SNP’s Ian Blackford who seems
This afternoon, the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the House of Commons. A single flat-screen TV broadcast his speech to a packed chamber. Zelensky appeared in plain green fatigues next to Ukraine’s blue-and-yellow flag. He looked pale, tired, fearless and determined. Squads of foreign killers are roaming his homeland trying to find him. His words
The Collaboration is set in the 1980s when Andy Warhol teamed up with the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat to create bad art and flog it to idiots. The play unfolds like a documentary and we meet the real-life Warhol. In interviews he rarely said more than ‘yeah’, or ‘cool’, and he explains that this taciturn style
Boris looks quite the statesman as he deals with the Ukraine crisis. MPs have spotted this and they want to join in. At PMQs the chamber was a-flutter with the colours of Ukraine. Female MPs sported blue skirts and gold blouses. One wore a pair of bright yellow tights from M&S’s ‘Je Suis Kiev’ range.
How at home Rishi Sunak looks in the company of academics. The chancellor delivered the 34th Mais Lecture this afternoon at the Bayes Business School in east London. Standing at the lectern in his dapper blue suit, he had the air of a cerebral super-monk bred on figs and yogurt. He’s the first British chancellor
The Forest is the latest thriller from the French dramatist Florian Zeller, translated by Oscar winner Christopher Hampton. It’s a well-worn yarn of adultery, betrayal and vengeance set among the yuppie classes. The action is located in France but the actors speak in Home Counties accents. (In theory, at least. Some are better at imitating
Remember Alex Salmond? The former SNP leader is back. Since 2017 his little-known programme, The Alex Salmond Show, has aired weekly on RT which receives its funding from the Kremlin. Today at PMQs the party leaders combined to plug Salmond’s programme and to boost his ratings. It wasn’t a debate. It was a 30-minute Salmond
Never Not Once has a cold and forbidding title but it starts as an amusing tale set in an LA apartment. We meet Allison, a happily married lesbian, whose grown-up daughter, Eleanor, arrives with a hunky new boyfriend to show off. This set-up has the makings of a flatshare sitcom. You combine a straight younger
A Number, by Caryl Churchill, is a sci-fi drama of impenetrable complexity. It’s set in a future society where cloning has become possible for those on modest incomes. A Cockney father reveals to his grown-up son that he’s a replica of his older brother who died, aged four, in a car crash that also killed
And still they try. MPs are desperate to get the Prime Minister to quit, live on TV, during PMQs. As if that’s about to happen. Sir Starmer has spent the last week polishing his puns. The busy wordsmith has spotted that the verb ‘scrap’ may mean ‘fight’ as well as ‘abolish’. Inspired by this linguistic
