Lloyd Evans

Lloyd Evans

Lloyd Evans is The Spectator's sketch-writer and theatre critic

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BREAKING NEWS: ‘Enjoyable play found at Royal Court.’ Generally, the Court likes to send its customers home feeling depressed, guilty, frightened or suicidal. And, generally, it succeeds. The Kid Stays in the Picture is based on the memoirs of Hollywood super-mogul Robert Evans. Director Simon McBurney uses artful lighting and complex staging effects to disguise

Jeremy Corbyn looks lost at the despatch box

Tactics! At long last. Jeremy Corbyn actually used tactics at today’s PMQs. For the first time ever he divided his six questions into two three-ball overs. He spent the initial trio on last week’s terror attacks. Then, after an unsettling delay, he used three more on Mrs May’s fibs about school budgets. She says they’ve

Royal prerogative

No one should complain that My Country; a work in progress is a grim night out. It’s rare for a good play to be written by royal command. The co-authors are the Queen’s personal minstrel, Carol Ann Duffy, and the director of her Royal National Theatre, Rufus Norris. These inspiring artistes have sent their vassals

PMQs sketch: Come on Eileen, says Corbyn

A bizarre exercise in diplomacy from Jeremy Corbyn at PMQs. He manoeuvred the PM into a tricky corner and then stepped gallantly in to disperse the trouble he’d arranged. She’d been caught violating a manifesto commitment to protect school funding. The statistics proved it too. Corbyn’s back-room elves had devised a clever way to summarise

Ersatz erudition

Harry Potter, who uses the stage name Daniel Radcliffe, is a producer’s delight. By now it’s becoming clear that the four-eyed wizard lacks distinction as an actor. He’s not a comedian, certainly not a leading man or a heart-throb, and he hasn’t the ugliness or eccentricity to be a villain. But this Polyfilla quality means

Changing of the Bard

Hamlet was probably written sometime between 1599 and 1602. The Almeida’s new version opens with a couple of security guards watching surveillance footage taken in a corridor. Well, of course it does. Nothing says ‘late medieval Denmark’ like closed-circuit television. Hamlet (Andrew Scott) appears. His black shirt and matching trousers suggest a snooker pro at

All that jazz | 2 March 2017

It’s every impresario’s dream. Buy a little off-West End venue to try out stuff for fun. Andrew Lloyd Webber has snaffled up the St James Theatre (rebranded The Other Palace), which he intends to run as a warm-up track for new musicals. First off the blocks The Wild Party, a New York import set in

What’s next for Jeremy Corbyn?

Got a daff pinned to your lapel? I haven’t. St David’s Day caused a predictable outbreak of Taffy-fondling in the House. Little yellow flowers winked gamely from the suits of several MPs, though many seem to be about as Welsh as Bombay Duck. What good is served by this annual flashing of custard-coloured flora? A

Let’s talk about sex | 23 February 2017

What does it take to become a prostitute? Youth, beauty, courage, sexual allure, a love of money, a need for hard drugs, an addiction to risk? None of these, according to this fascinating show written and performed by London sex workers. What prostitutes need is the right mindset: humane, adaptable, tolerant, altruistic. Sex work is

Jeremy Corbyn challenges Labour to a race to the bottom

The so-called leader of the so-called opposition gave another so-called performance today. Jeremy Corbyn seems to have challenged the Labour party to a slalom race. Target: rock bottom. Go Corbo! his enemies cheer as they watch his hapless figure slithering and shimmying down the ice-floes of public contempt. Today he came to the Commons with

Stuffed but dissatisfied

Sandi Toksvig’s new play opens in a Gravesend care home where five grannies and a temporary nurse are threatened by rising floodwaters. In Act One the ladies prepare for a rescue party that fails to materialise. In Act Two they build a life raft out of plastic bottles. There’s a bizarre sequence involving a silly

Timeless and dated

Tennessee Williams’s breakthrough play is a portrait of his dysfunctional family. A young writer, Tom (Williams’s real name), lives with his effusively domineering mother and his painfully coy sister, Laura. Mother, once a famous beauty, gets Tom to find an eligible chap for Laura. Tough call. Beautiful Laura has a deformed ankle and she’s just

Jeremy Corbyn blows a golden chance to roast Theresa May

How to sabotage a deadly ambush. This was Jeremy Corbyn’s contribution to the political play-book today. He came to Parliament lethally armed. A cache of secret messages apparently between a Government wonk and the leader of Surrey County Council suggest some very shady goings-on. Mr Corbyn’s task was simple. Read out the intercepts and watch

Playing dead

It could be the nuttiest idea ever. The protagonist of this American musical is Death, who secretly reprieves a beautiful Italian princess, Grazia, and spends the weekend at her father’s palace where a house party is in full swing. The dad knows the gatecrasher’s identity. But Death introduces himself to the others as a suave

Jeremy Corbyn offers up another dismal showing at PMQs

Mrs May has spent the week meeting naughty presidents. Today she was made to pay for it. Parliamentarians were queuing up to scold her for missing a great opportunity to bleat, pout, whine and nag on the world stage. She’s been to America where she failed to lecture Donald Trump on his meanness to Muslims and

Amphibious assault

David Spicer’s farce Raising Martha opens with a skeleton being disinterred on a frog farm by animal-rights activists. They hope to force the frog farmer, an ageing dope fiend, to set his amphibious livestock free. Got all that? It’s complicated. And there’s more. The skeleton turns out to be the long-dead mother of the farmer,

Remembrance of things past

The Kite Runner, a novel by Khaled Hosseini, has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide. Now it arrives on the West End stage, a doggedly efficient piece that somehow lacks true dazzle. The narrative style involves thick wodges of plot being delivered at the audience like news bulletins on the half-hour. The emotional range