Lloyd Evans

Bitter Wheat, David Mamet’s latest play, features a loathsome Hollywood hotshot, Barney Fein, who offers to turn an actress into a superstar provided she lets him rape her. The show’s gruesome storyline has flashes of bitter comedy. Fein boasts that the Writers Guild of America would ‘drink a beaker of my mucus’ if he forced them to. Although this is the ultimate #MeToo play it can’t prevent itself from taking a masculine point of view. Fein’s assistant, Sondra (Doon Mackichan), conveniently vanishes at the right moment and leaves the starlet at the monster’s mercy. But was Sondra complicit? We aren’t told. And we learn nothing about her attitude to her boss.

Kill Climate Deniers is a provocative satire by Australian theatre-activist David Finnigan. The title sounds misanthropic and faintly deranged but the show is a comedy delivered with oodles of verve and fun. Finnigan is a skilful writer of dialogue, a gifted farceur and, at times, an astute analyst of power and its corrupting tendencies. Like most Aussies, he’s incapable of pomposity and his show takes a pop at every player in this game: the politicians, the shock jocks, the sainted Greens and the media. A TV journalist has the surname ‘Ile’ — an anagram of ‘lie’. Finnigan reminds us that the bulk of eco-warriors are white middle-class malcontents whose priority is not to save planet Earth but to get themselves noticed.

Sometimes it’s hard to describe a play without appearing to defame the writer, the performer and the theatre responsible for the production. Here’s what I saw. A semi-naked woman lurks in a corner, with her back to the audience, shaking. Rap music pounds. The woman shakes and shakes. Then she shakes a bit more. And a bit more. As her weird spasms enter their 17th uninterrupted minute, the spectators glance anxiously at their watches. Finally the woman’s twitching ceases. Speaking in a New York accent, she recites a conversation between an inquisitive child and an older girl. The theme is explicit sex chat.

Kenneth Lonergan, who wrote the movie Manchester by the Sea, shapes his work from loss, disillusionment, small-mindedness, hesitation and superficiality, all the forgettable detritus of life. The Starry Messenger is about Mark, a disappointed astronomer aged 52, who gives public lectures at a city planetarium. He loves his subject even though it let him down and every week he tackles the daft questions of his pupils with superhuman patience. The same two pests always raise their hands. One is a burly misanthrope who disbelieves all experts, the other is a high-flying oddball who craves attention. Mark starts a slow-burn affair with Angela, a single mum who needs a role model for her nine-year old son: an expert on the stars and inter-planetary travel is just the ticket.

Arts Council England takes money from almost all of us and spends it on culture for almost none of us. Among its clique of favoured writers is Ella Hickson whose work has twice been staged at the subsidised Almeida. Her first effort was a historical sketch show about oil-drilling, the second looked at the problem of elderly gropers who commission scripts from vulnerable tragediennes We have the NT to thank for her latest, Anna, a title that’s unlikely to set the pulse of theatreland racing. Viewers take their seats and are asked to don headpieces. The stage is shielded from the auditorium by a soundproof membrane of glass that stays in place during the action. Listening to the dialogue through headphones makes us feel like secret policemen monitoring a bugged apartment.

The opening of Jonathan Maitland’s new play about Boris purports to be based on real events. Just before the referendum, the Tory maverick invited some chums over to help him decide whether to opt for Leave or Remain. Mrs Johnson was present along with Michael and Sarah Gove and the Evening Standard’s owner, Evgeny Lebedev. For a bit of fun, the writer adds spectral appearances from three ex-prime ministers, Blair, Thatcher and Churchill. This is amusing at first but it slows the play down because the fantasy figures can’t affect the real-life action. There are dazzling performances here. Tim Wallers plays Evgeny as a name-dropping simpleton with naked ankles and an ultra-camp gait. Wonderful.

Colour-blind casting is a denial of history. The Young Vic’s all-black version of Death of a Salesman asks us to believe that an ordinary African-American chap living in Brooklyn in 1928 might have owned a Chevrolet, and that a black businessman in the 1940s would consider asking a friend for ten grand to purchase a ranch in Texas. Younger viewers may assume that US society has been racially integrated for nearly a century. Is that the right message? Willy Loman, the duffer at the play’s core, is one of American drama’s least attractive heroes. A preachy, devious, boastful, fawning, angry, narcissistic misery guts, he’s professionally incompetent and morally bankrupt.

Small Island, based on Andrea Levy’s novel about Jamaican migrants in Britain, feels like the world’s longest book review. We meet Hortense, a priggish school teacher, and her cool, handsome boyfriend who survive on a pittance in the Caribbean. Then we skip back to Hortense’s childhood in a house dominated by a bullying preacher who forbids conversations at mealtime. Then we cross the Atlantic to Lincolnshire and meet a chirpy blonde, Queenie, whose auntie runs a sweetie shop. Does Queenie want a job selling sweeties? Yes, says Queenie to her auntie. All this takes ages, and it feels like a deadly earnest sociology lecture. Then a stiff young bank clerk enters the shop and asks Queenie if she’d like to go for a walk. And the show takes off.

It starts on a beautiful summer’s morning in the suburbs of America. A prosperous middle-aged dad is chatting with his neighbours in the garden of his comfortable home, but by nightfall his family has been destroyed. This is one of the most momentous convulsions in all drama. Arthur Miller’s masterful plotting, which he never again surpassed, is a match for the best. By the best I mean Oedipus. Jeremy Herrin’s production emphasises the lush fertility of America in the late 1940s. Trees in full leaf overlook the timber house that is perhaps a little too small for its millionaire owner. Joe Keller is a pioneering industrialist who served a brief jail term for supplying faulty components to the air force during the war. More than 20 pilots died.

It starts at a secretarial college. The stage is occupied by a dignified elderly lady who recalls her pleasure at learning shorthand in the 1920s. She lived in Germany and she took a job at a firm headed by a man named Goldberg. He was Jewish. These unremarkable disclosures are spoken by Brunhilde Pomsel, a woman of high intellect and modest ambitions, who was born in 1911 and died two years ago, aged 106. Her life story was turned into a documentary film, which Christopher Hampton has adapted for the stage. Pomsel’s words are spoken by Dame Maggie Smith. What makes her fascinating is that she worked for Josef Goebbels and spent the entire war in the propaganda ministry in Berlin. Her acceptance of Nazism is gradual and semi-conscious.