Lloyd Evans is The Spectator's sketch-writer and theatre critic
Last week Britain was a free-market democracy. Now we’re living in a one-party state. The transition became clear at PMQs today where General-Secretary Johnson gave bland and reassuring replies to super-soft questions from tame MPs. The House was half empty. Members practised a sort of semi-self-isolation. They sat apart from each other by a distance
Here’s the problem. Much communication is done online, especially by youngsters, and much drama focuses on communication. So how do theatre-makers represent emails and telephonic chitchat in ways that are stimulating and realistic? The usual solution is to mount blank screens around the stage and to beam the comms on to the boards while the
He began with a touch of statesmanlike solemnity about the pandemic. ‘The British people may be worried but they are not daunted. We will protect this country and our people. We will rise to this challenge.’ This was Rishi Sunak delivering his first budget. Many viewers will not have seen him give a sustained performance
The Prince of Egypt is a musical adapted from a 1998 Dreamworks cartoon based on the Book of Exodus. So the original writer is God. The show opens with a troupe of fit young athletes working on Pharaoh’s latest tomb. And they look like the best-fed slaves in history. A meat-rich diet and round-the-clock access
The PM defended his Home Secretary as opposition members tried to force her resignation, live on TV, at PMQs. Priti Patel, in a muted fuchsia dress, sat on the Treasury bench nestled snugly between Jacob Rees-Mogg and the Prime Minister. This casual arrangement cannot have been more deliberate. Here she is, announced the seating-plan, and
A Moorish princess shipwrecked on the English coast disguises herself as a boy to protect her virtue. Arriving in London, she’s hired by William Shakespeare as an assistant to his maidservant Kate, who instantly falls in love with the exotic cross-dressing newcomer. This absurdity, familiar to fans of Twelfth Night, is the opening move in
The floods got Jeremy Corbyn into a pickle at PMQs. The Labour leader started off by out-virtuing Boris. The PM had expressed sympathy with the victims of Storms Chiara and Dennis. Corbyn stood up. ‘My thoughts are with those suffering across the world with the corona-virus,’ he said tartly. He accused the PM of responding
An office worker stands on the ledge of an open window about to leap. Two colleagues enter, ignoring him completely. They sit at symmetrical desks and read reports about the man’s background while he clings to the window frame, poised between life and death. This is the opening of Samuel Beckett’s Rough for Theatre II,
History will record Leopoldstadt as Tom Stoppard’s Schindler’s List. His brilliant tragic-comic play opens in the Jewish quarter of Vienna in 1899. We meet a family of intellectuals and businessmen who are celebrating their very first Christmas. The eldest son, Hermann, has married a Catholic and become ‘Christianised’ in order to smooth his path through
Labour’s leadership candidates were grilled by Newsnight’s Katie Razzall last night. Avuncular Sir Keir Starmer, with his greying thatch and bulky frame, looked like a body-builder gone to seed. He spoke in a bluff, commandeering tone that suggested the leadership is his already – and he knows it. His main rival, Rebecca Long-Bailey, seemed ill at
Things got pretty tasty at PMQs. Jeremy Corbyn was well prepared and emerged, messily, as the victor. It started badly for the Labour leader. Ironic cheers rang out when his name was called. Up he stood. But instead of building to a joyous climax, the cheers dropped to nothing. Stark silence followed. This seemed amusing
Nish Kumar was the star turn on Friday at a ‘Brexit and Comedy’ panel discussion in central London. The event was staged by ‘The UK in a Changing Europe’ which describes itself as ‘an independent organisation created to make the findings of academic research easily available.’ Essentially it’s a left-leaning think-tank which behaves like a
The Gift is three plays in one. It opens in a blindingly white Victorian parlour where a posh lady, Sarah, is teaching her clumsy maid to serve tea correctly. Both characters are black. Sarah’s prosperous husband, also black, arrives home and the scene continues as the gauche skivvy (Donna Berlin, brilliant) makes more and more
Climate change dogged PMQs today. ‘We are at the eleventh hour to save the planet,’ announced Jeremy Corbyn grimly. The experts who warn of disaster have clearly caught the Labour leader’s ear. ‘Coastal flooding and crop failures could threaten political chaos,’ said Noel Brown, director of the UN Environment Programme. He added that a polar
Remainers were there too. The first people I met at the Brexit Day festivities were opposed to the whole idea. I found them on Westminster Bridge, a man and his wife, posing with an EU flag. When the man spoke his voice faltered as if his pet spaniel had just died. ‘I married a German
Uncle Vanya opens with a puzzle. Is the action set in the early 20th century or right now? The furnishings might be modern purchases or inherited antiques, and the costumes are also styled ambiguously. It soon becomes clear from Conor McPherson’s script, which uses colloquialisms like ‘wanging on’, that this is a contemporary version. It’s
Jeremy Corbyn has stopped asking questions at PMQs. The lecture-circuit now looms for the Labour leader, so he uses the Wednesday sessions to practise the Grand Orations he will soon be making to drowsy socialists in overheated conference-halls around the world. He’s unlikely to match the fees commanded by the world’s top lecture-stars, Tony Blair
Falling In Love Again features two of the 20th century’s best-known sex athletes. Ron Elisha’s drama covers a long drunken night spent by Marlene Dietrich and Edward VIII at Fort Belvedere, near Windsor, on the eve of Edward’s abdication in December 1936. It sounds like a contrived premise for a play but Elisha, who researches
PMQs began with a tussle over Universal Credit. Jeremy Corbyn’s team of wordsmiths and brainstormers had spent the morning ransacking a thesaurus for words meaning ‘destructive’. They found ‘broken, damaging, dangerous, callous, cruel, punitive and vicious.’ They added ‘very cruel’ for good measure. These were the labels Corbyn applied to Universal Credit. ‘It should go,’
What’s John Bercow up to these days? The ex-Speaker is enjoying the limelight, of course, but he isn’t necessarily cashing in. Last Friday, he did a solo gig at a community centre in Holland Park where his appearance raised thousands of pounds for a local charity. He charged no fee. And he spent time before
