Lloyd Evans

Death of a Black Man is a little-known script from the 1970s written by Alfred Fagon who suffered a fatal heart attack in 1986, aged 49. It’s an intriguing but sloppily written play set in 1973 about a pair of black London teenagers who are hustling for cash in the music business and the furniture trade. Shakie has lucked his way into a Chelsea flat where he makes money flogging African chairs to gullible Americans. His best friend, Stumpie, needs a loan to bring a band of African drummers to the UK. Meanwhile Shakie’s ex-girlfriend, Jackie, has returned from Jamaica to sponge off him and enjoy the high life. Scriptwriting blunders abound. Fagon uses soliloquys to reveal motivation. ‘I wonder who owns this flat,’ says Jackie to herself.

Godot Is a Woman opens with three tramps standing on a bare stage beneath a solitary upright. This isn’t Samuel Beckett’s famous drama about a pair of vagrants, Vladimir and Estragon, who wait in vain for a mysterious visitor. This is a spoof in which a trio of actors (two female, one non-binary) seek a licence to perform the script that Beckett insisted must be played by male actors only. The upright prop is a telephone box and the thesps are trying to get through to the Beckett estate. They’re answered by a robotic female voice. ‘You are 9,124th in the call queue.’ A burst of inane lift music fills the air and the actors pass the time by performing a comic dance routine that lasts 15 minutes.

The latest movie to turn into a musical is Amélie, from 2001, about a Parisian do-gooder or ‘godmother of the unloved’. Some rate Amélie as the worst film ever made in France. Some consider it the worst film ever made. Our heroine is a 20-year-old waitress, a sort of proto-Greta, who plays truant from her restaurant job and wanders around Paris doing nice things to random strangers. Her inspiration is a box hidden by a child in her apartment 40 years earlier which she wants to restore to its original owner. Or, as the clunky narrator puts it, ‘Why is she holding that box like her future is inside it?’ Amélie’s odyssey brings her into contact with all kinds of misfits, pests and layabouts who belong in a magic realist novel.

Back to the Globe after more than a year. The theatre has zealously maintained its pre--Covid staffing levels. On press night, there were eight sentries patrolling the forecourt where just 42 masked spectators watched a revival of Sean Holmes’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Globe describes his show as ‘raucous’. The action is set in a forest near Athens during the classical era but the text uses 16th-century English. So it seems crazy to add a third time zone but most directors do so unquestioningly. This modernised production features an array of multicoloured stylings inspired by funfairs and Caribbean carnivals. The palette is a mad rainbow of acid pinks, savage yellows, eye-stabbing greens and brutal scarlets.

A Russian Doll is a monologue about Putin’s campaign to swing the Brexit vote in his favour. It stars Rachel Redford whose Borat accent becomes grating after a little. She plays Masha, a computer wizard and language expert, who works for a firm of hackers appointed to spread fake news ahead of the referendum. Masha uses two techniques. She poses as a British Facebook subscriber and drops scary comments on to her timeline. ‘If we don’t leave the EU, Muslim extremists will flood the country.’ Her other ploy is to share a quiz about bikinis with her female correspondents. If the offer is taken up, the bots can harvest data from the correspondents and from their followers too. These methods seem rather time-consuming and haphazard.

Lockdown is about to end but some theatres are gripped by cabin fever and want to explore the two new formats created by the pandemic. One is the Zoom play with multiple actors, the other is the sequence of filmed soliloquys linked by a theme or storyline. Tim Crouch has directed a Zoom version of B.S. Johnson’s satire House Mother Normal, which is set in an old folks’ home in the 1960s. The inmates are detained in a communal ward run by a sadistic nurse, the ‘house mother’, who enforces a programme of singalongs and party games. The house mother carries a weapon and feels free to beat anyone who defies her authority. That sounds peculiar but in the mid-20th century it was common for medical staff to lord it over their patients like public school prefects.

A new work by Alan Bennett features in Still Life, a medley of five ‘untold stories’ from Nottingham Playhouse. The dramas were filmed during lockdown. Before the Bennett première, there’s a monologue by a wittering granny complaining about the price of cereal in a deserted food bank. Then, a banality-crammed slice of jabber between two van drivers eating lunch on a flight of stairs. This is followed by a ten-minute soliloquy from a precocious schoolgirl whose insights include, ‘my books are very heavy’ and ‘England is not part of Scotland’. A fourth cascade of tosh is parroted by a dim cab driver who trundles around the city bantering aimlessly with an eminently forgettable passenger.

Money is a new internet play about financial corruption starring Mel Giedroyc. She appears on-screen for less time than it takes to eat a Malteser. Giedroyc plays the boss of a palm-oil firm that wipes out orangutan habitats in Asia and wants to launder its reputation by donating cash to a London charity. A million quid is on the table. The charity staff meet via Zoom to discuss the gift. But first they brief each other about their latest activities which, predictably enough, consist of stoking grievances and spreading self-pity. Their charitable aims include ‘tackling local loneliness’, and ‘breaking down barriers based on age, race and gender’. The meeting then moves to the big question: should they accept cash from a firm that kills cuddly animals?

The Bush Theatre’s new strand, 2036, opens with a monologue, Pawn, which takes its name from the most downtrodden piece on the chessboard. The speaker, Jordan, is an amiable dimwit of mixed Trinidadian and South African heritage whose mother explains his background to him like a condescending anthropologist: ‘Trinidad and South Africa are countries with cultures too rich for most people to understand.’ Jordan describes his life in London which consists exclusively of battling oppression. He buys fried chicken from Yusef, a Turkish food-seller, and he learns a greeting in Turkish that Yusef recognises. So Yusef starts to slip him extra portions as a perk. A white teenager hears of this practice and orders Yusef to suspend the freebies to Jordan.

Hats off to the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond. They’ve discovered a new form of racism. Some people say we have enough ethnic division already but in south-west London they’re gagging for more apparently. A new play, Prodigal, examines the prejudice endured by a Ugandan chap whose mother moved to London when he was a child and whose younger siblings are British. Family tensions depressed him. ‘You all made me feel ugly,’ he moans. The shifty whinger has returned home after his mother’s death in order to cheat his family out of an insurance pay-off. It’s remarkable to see a drama that reinforces a damaging stereotype but the author, Kalungi Ssebandeke, is content to put a bungling African crook on stage.

How will the theatre look after lockdown? A clue emerges in a statement made by Guy Jones, the literary associate of the Orange Tree in Richmond. ‘The victims of this year are many. Homelessness is on the rise, loneliness is deadly, the monster of racism lurks in every-day interactions… and many of the inequalities we live with are written into the systems in which we are asked to participate.’ ‘The victims’. That’s his starting point. It might seem odd that a theatre should prioritise the injured and the aggrieved, as if the stage were a tribunal or a public court where justice is dispensed. But that’s how theatres see themselves. Lockdown and the rise of BLM in 2020 have created a host of new causes to be fought over by snarling dramatists.