Lloyd Evans

Describe the Night opens in Poland in 1920 where two Russian soldiers, Isaac and Nikolai, discuss truth and falsehood. Next we’re in Smolensk, 2010, where some strangers scream at each other about a hire car. Next Moscow, 1931 (or 1937 — the surtitles are illegible), where Nikolai, now a top soldier, asks Isaac, now a successful screen-writer, to audition his wife for a movie. Isaac improvises a scene with the wife and then fondles her bottom as they perform a weirdly sexless dance that is supposed to symbolise something, but it’s unclear what because everything that preceded the dance was indecipherable. Then the interval. I looked for enlightenment in the programme notes and discovered what the play is supposed to be about. It’s fascinating stuff.

Nine Night refers to a Jamaican custom that obliges bereaved families to party non-stop for more than a week following the death of a parent. When Gloria expires her relatives arrive from all parts of London and the Caribbean to indulge in a boozy blow-out. Gloria’s daughter Lorraine tussles with her businessman brother, Robert, who wants to stave off bankruptcy by flogging the family home immediately. Their half-sister, Trudy, arrives from Jamaica and collapses in hysterics over her abandonment by Gloria in infancy. Everyone lives in fear of Auntie Maggie, a pious matriarch, who uses a walking stick and whose religious devotion conceals the heart of an emotional despot. Cecilia Noble (Maggie) delivers a tour de force as the nit-picking hypochondriac.

Ella Hickson’s last play at the Almeida was a sketch show about oil. Her new effort uses the same episodic format ornamented with ‘meta-textual experimentation’ (i.e. plotless confusion). The central character is a brilliant young female writer who finds that all male theatre directors are boorish cynical greedy philistine racist sex pests. In Sketch One she meets a smarmy monster twice her age who tries to seduce her with the offer of a script commission. Sketch Two is a commentary on Sketch One, which turns out to have been a play within a play. Sketch Three shows the writer cohabiting with a loser who ‘sells football boots’. The loser has just bought a new sofa (with her money) and he baptises it with an enforced bout of loveless copulation.

‘Hunt the Flop’, the Royal Court’s bizarre quest for dud plays, has found a candidate for this year’s overall prize. Instructions for Correct Assembly by Thomas Eccleshare is a family satire set in the near future. Plot: suburban parents replace their missing son with a computerised cyborg which malfunctions. That’s it. Were this a pitch for a TV sketch show the producer would say, ‘OK, but then what?’ The answer here is virtually nothing. Early on, the cyborg makes embarrassing political statements and expresses support for Brexit. The parents hastily silence him using a hand-held device that returns him to their dead-safe Guardianista outlook.

Quiz by James Graham looks at the failed attempt in 2001 to swindle a million quid from an ITV game show. Jackpot winner Major Charles Ingram was thought to have been helped by strategic coughs emanating from Tecwen Whittock, a fellow contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Graham, best known for his gripping political dramas, can’t muster any passion for this story or his characters. Ingram is a posh, weepy lummox. His wife, Diana, comes across as a blur of aloofness, cunning and banality. Whittock, who claimed to suffer from a persistent throat condition, is a clueless hobbit with a wonky Welsh accent. And Diana’s brother, tangentially involvedin the drama, is an amiably bumbling spendthrift. The material has a built-in problem. Whose side are we on?

David Haig’s play Pressure looks at the Scottish meteorologist, James Stagg, who advised Eisenhower about the weather in the week before D-Day. The play works by detaching us from our foreknowledge of events. We’re aware that the landings went off smoothly on 6 June in fine conditions. However, D-Day was originally scheduled for 5 June, and for the preceding month southern England had basked in a prolonged sunny spell. According to Eisenhower’s American meteorologist, this was set to continue. But Stagg believed a storm was about to engulf the channel. Eisenhower trusted Stagg and postponed D-Day. The storm arrived, albeit tardily, which vindicated Stagg who then foresaw a brief period of clear skies and low winds for the following day. Eisenhower trusted him again.

Ruthless! The Musical is a camp extravaganza about ambitious actors stranded in small-town America. Sylvia St Croix, a pushy agent, visits a super-talented 10-year-old, Tina, and persuades her to audition for Pippi Longstocking in a school play. Tina’s mother fears that stardom may spoil her little girl but Tina is finished with childhood. ‘Time to move on.’ The production feels like a zany Spike Milligan sketch with a garish set and over-the-top costumes. Sylvia is played by Justin Gardiner who swaggers about like a cross-dressing cowboy in a clingy frock and false breasts. The dialogue, which takes cheap shots at bourgeois morality, may not suit all tastes. Try this. Tina complains to Sylvia that she never sees her father.

Summer and Smoke by Tennessee Williams dates from the late 1940s. He hadn’t quite reached the peaks of sentimental delicacy he found in his golden period but he was getting there. As a lesser-known curiosity, the script deserves a production that explains itself openly and plainly. Rebecca Frecknall has directed a beautiful and sometimes bizarre-looking show which is beset by ‘great ideas’. What a great idea to encircle the stage with upright pianos that the actors can cavort on, and whose exposed innards can twinkle with atmospheric lights at poignant moments. The pianos are an ingenious and handsome solo effort but they serve the designer’s ends and not the play’s. Another great idea was to include a booming soundtrack, often irrelevant, sometimes intrusive.

The Best Man by Gore Vidal is set during a fictional American election in 1960. Two gifted candidates seek their party’s nomination. Secretary Russell is a chilly but experienced political hack whose marriage is a sham. Senator Cantwell, a more attractive character, is an impulsive charmer married to a blonde bombshell who adores him. The show feels dated but the acting, the costumes and the set designs capture the period nicely. The plot is perhaps short of pace and density. Each character has an embarrassing secret to hide. Secretary Russell suffered a mental breakdown a few years ago. Senator Cantwell enjoyed a bisexual fling in the army. The action turns on their ability to keep these details hush-hush.

He looks like an absent-minded watchmaker, or a homeless chess champion, or a stray physics genius trying to find his way to the Nobel Prize ceremony. He’s in his early sixties, tall and stooping, a bit thin on top, wearing a greatcoat and a crumpled polo-neck jumper. A blur of whiskers obscures the line of his jaw. He has a bulbous, Larkinesque skull and battleship-grey teeth; and if you wanted to cast someone as Spooner, the literary vagrant in Pinter’s No Man’s Land, you’d struggle to find a closer match. This is Michael Boyd, former director of the RSC, who was knighted in 2012 for services to drama. We meet in a dressing-room in a west London studio where he’s rehearsing the Cherry Orchard for Bristol Old Vic. He has deep roots in the Russian theatre.