Lloyd Evans

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.

Frozen starts with a shrink having a panic attack. She hyperventilates into her hand-bag and then gets drunk on an aeroplane where she yells out, ‘We’re all going to die.’ She’s a bit loopy, clearly, which is how lazy playwrights make psychologists interesting. The shrink’s task is to examine Ralph, a serial murderer of children, and to deliver a lecture on the cause of his malignity. We hear bits from the lecture, bits of confession from Ralph, and weepy bits from the mother of one of Ralph’s victims. The subject is punishingly gruesome but its dramatic power is non-existent because the writer Bryony Lavery hasn’t learned how to stimulate the viewer’s imagination.

The Donmar’s new show, The York Realist, dates from 2001. The programme notes tell us that the playwright, Peter Gill, ‘is one of the most important and influential writers and directors of the past 30 years’. Who wrote that? Not Peter Gill, I hope. The play, directed by Robert Hastie, follows a gay affair between a strapping Yorkshire cowherd and a sensitive London artiste. They meet while rehearsing an am-dram production of a mystery play set in a ruined abbey. Gay men will enjoy this charmingly acted production but it’s apt to bore the general audience because the characters are trite, the gay theme feels antiquated and the storyline is as light as a Post-It note. It doesn’t help that Peter Gill writes like a newcomer at a creative writing weekend.

It’s considered the great masterpiece of 20th-century American drama. Oh, come off it. Long Day’s Journey into Night is a waffle-festival that descends into a torture session. Who would choose to spend time with the Tyrone family? Dad is a skinflint millionaire. Mum is a wittering smack addict. They’ve produced two layabout sons. One is a dipsomaniac with a moustache; the other has TB and a cough. These doomed narcissists chase each other around the family mansion in a spiral of vicious, self-regarding gossip. It’s like being trapped in a broken cable-car with four prattling drunks who hate each other. And I’m not convinced they drink that much. A bottle and a half of whisky, or a little over, is consumed in the course of a day.

Nicholas Hytner’s new show is a modern-dress Julius Caesar, heavily cut and played in the round. It runs for two hours, no interval. The action opens with the audience grouped around a central stage where a ramshackle rock gig descends into a riot. The play unfolds like an illegal rave at a warehouse. It’s bold, in its way, and some of it works. A couple of the Roman senators are played by actresses and the text has been bodged to suit the cult of gender neutrality. ‘Romans’ is substituted for ‘men’ in Mark Antony’s famous line, ‘so are they all, all honourable men’. This small change is curiously painful to hear. It turns the ominous finality of Shakespeare’s original into a tuneless clatter.

Geoff Norcott is lean, talkative, lightly bearded and intense. Britain’s first ‘openly Conservative’ comedian has benefited enormously from the Brexit vote and he’s popular with television producers who need a right-wing voice to balance out the left-leaning bias of most TV output. ‘It’s funny meeting TV types,’ he tells me. ‘They say, “We really want to hear alternative viewpoints.” And I’m thinking, “By alternative you mean majority,”’ Norcott, 41, was raised on a south London estate. ‘Both my parents were quite political. My dad was a trade unionist who got quite high up in the NEC [Labour’s national executive committee] and my mum ran as a Lib Dem councillor.

The Birthday Party is among Pinter’s earliest and strangest works. It deconstructs the conventions of a repertory thriller but doesn’t bother to reassemble them. The setting is a derelict seaside town on the south coast. Petey, a thick deckchair attendant, runs a guest-house with his ageing wife, Meg. She’s a zero-IQ cook whose signature dish is a slice of white toast charred in fat. They have one resident, Stanley, a former pianist whom Meg cossets and mothers like a substitute son. Enter two London thugs, Goldberg and McCann, who invite Stanley to a party as a pretext to punish him for unknown misdemeanours. The whisky-soaked celebrations involve a game of blind man’s bluff during which Stanley’s glasses are smashed, rendering him sightless.

A pattern emerges. A hot American playwright, dripping with prestigious awards, is honoured in London with a transfer of their best-known work. And it turns out to be all right. Not bad. Nothing special. The latest wunderkind to wow London is Amy Herzog (five plays performed, six awards received), whose marital bust-up drama Belleville is set in a glamorously derelict corner of Paris. Abby and Zack, both 28, are newlywed Americans trying to shore up the wreckage of their European gap year. Abby wanted to learn French but has stopped attending classes. Instead, she’s studying yoga although the lessons are regularly cancelled. And her acting career seems to have stalled.

The Twilight Zone, an American TV show from the early 1960s, reinvented the ghost story for the age of space exploration. Director Richard Jones has collaborated with Anne Washburn to turn several TV episodes into a single play. Eight episodes in all. Way too many. The structure is designed to bamboozle us from the start. Some of the storylines have been broken up and are placed episodically throughout the piece, while others are preserved as units and delivered whole. Even the most keen-eyed viewer gets flummoxed by this mystery.

It’s all about the rhythm. Hamilton is a musical that tells the story of America’s foundation through the medium of rap. It sounds crazy but it works because the show’s arsenal of effects is simply overwhelming. The lyrics drive the narrative, the rap gives energy to the lyrics, and the dancers double the effect by adding a visual complement to the pulsing soundscape. Dramatic lighting, synchronised with the music, provides a final sensory flourish. It’s like being softly slapped across the face with a beautiful velvet glove. The set is a luxuriantly solid affair, like a five-star hotel inspired by Wild West themes. Two wooden staircases soar up towards a raised gallery draped with thick lassos.