Lloyd Evans is The Spectator's sketch-writer and theatre critic
David Cameron was grilled today on plans for a ‘7-day NHS’. This is his attempt to iron out a slight kink in the NHS schedules. The trouble is that although our heroic doctors and nurses keep regular hours our deadly diseases are hopelessly unpredictable and like to smite us down whenever they feel a bit
Here’s how to set yourself up for a fall. You stage the world première of your debut play in the West End and you cast yourself in the lead role. Matthew Perry (Chandler Bing from Friends) has invited a critical monstering by brazenly challenging all-comers like this and the result is a terrible let-down. For
The Master Builder, if done properly, can be one of those theatrical experiences that make you wonder if the Greeks were a teeny bit overrated. Matthew Warchus’s version is four-fifths there. Ralph Fiennes is well equipped to play Halvard Solness, the cold, brilliant autocrat with a troubled past who falls into the arms of a
Housing is Jeremy Corbyn’s second favourite subject (after drainage lids). Back in the 1970s the grateful proletariat hailed his long years of service as Commissar For Council Accommodation in the People’s Republic of Haringey. At his retirement, chanting school-girls tied garlands of lilies around his brows and presented him with a commemorative Rent Book in
Florian Zeller has been reading Pinter. And Pinter started out in repertory thrillers where suspense was created by delaying revelations until the last minute. He tried an experiment. Suppose you delay the revelations indefinitely. The results were interesting. Pinter’s characters were vague, stark silhouettes lacking background and substance. Audiences found them inscrutably suggestive. Zeller follows
The referendum is slowly (very slowly) breaking up Cameron’s cabinet. It’s put him in a weird mood. Yesterday he was striding about in shirt-sleeves like a bogus realtor selling flats on the moon. At PMQs today he was calmer and prepared for some rough weather. It failed to materialise. Jez We Can (Do a U-turn
A beautiful crumbling theatre in Notting Hill is under threat. The Coronet, which bills itself as the Print Room, faces the menace of renovation. The lovely rambling building has the tumbledown air of an abandoned Romanian palace. The raised stage sits opposite the dress circle of a former cinema and the auditorium, steeply raked, is
Jeremy Corbyn hasn’t changed his clothes since Christmas. He arrived at PMQs today in his dependable outfit of non-slip shoes, biscuit-coloured suit and minimum-wage tie. His white, flattened scalp and his mood of perplexed fatigue make him look like a dutiful pensioner inspecting a care-home for his beloved mum and wondering if he might check
Paul Minx ventures boldly into Tennessee Williams country with The Long Road South. It’s 1965 and the Price family are idling about at home in Indiana. In mid-August the air is heavy with frustrated sexuality. Carol Ann Price (Imogen Stubbs) is a kindly, buxom waster slithering decorously into alcoholic dereliction. Her daughter, Ivy, is a
A new face at PMQs becomes samey after a few months. Corbo reached that point some time ago and Cameron can now contain him without breaking a sweat. He’s not threatened by the Labour leader for the simple reason that Corbyn lacks any forensic guile. To prepare, mount or press home an attack is beyond
It begins with a sketch. We’re in a prison in 1963 where Harry Wade, the UK’s second most famous hangman, is overseeing the execution of a killer who protests his innocence. The well-built convict effortlessly shrugs aside two burly but incompetent prison officers. ‘I’m being hanged by nincompoops,’ he laments. One of them helpfully points
Cameron has a dream. And Jeremy Corbyn wants to destroy it. Our belligerent prime minister has declared war on those inner-city council estates that foster poverty, despair, unemployment, truancy, social exclusion, (and an aversion to Tory candidates). His hope is to replace these crime-ridden concrete citadels with frondy low-rise dream-homes. It sounds like Syria organised
Damon Albarn and Rufus Norris present a musical version of Alice in Wonderland. A challenging enterprise even if they’d stuck to the original but they’ve fast-forwarded everything to the present day. The titular heroine, a trusting and solemn Victorian schoolgirl, has been recast as Aly, a wheedling teenage grump who loathes her mum, her dad,
Corybn gave his wettest ever performance at PMQs. The party leaders had different theories about the authorship of the floods. Corbyn blamed Cameron. Cameron blamed the weather. Rainfall, he explained, had wept from the heavens in such unheralded quantities that a record-breaking dip-stick had to be lowered into the bucket to assess its full volume.
Illness forced Kim Cattrall to withdraw from Linda, the Royal Court’s new show, and Noma Dumezweni scooped up the debris at the last minute. And what debris. All thoughts of kittenish Cattrall evaporated as Dumezweni strode on to the stage, a luscious blend of high-performance hair and trouser-suited luminosity. Linda is in her prime, at
Corbyn was back on drone duty at PMQs. He monotoned his way through six questions about NHS funding and gave the impression that a winter crisis would really make his Christmas. Ed Miliband had the same habit of suggesting that only mass-death could save him. Semi-comatose Corbs remained on ‘stand-by mode’ throughout. He didn’t react
It’s the target that makes the satire as well as the satirist. Is the subject powerful, active, relevant and menacing? Patrick Barlow’s new spoof, Ben Hur, must answer ‘No’ on all four counts. The show takes aim at two principal irritants: vain actors and the Hollywood epics of the 1950s, whose titanic scale was offered
Jeremy Corbyn is like the lights in a planetarium. Whenever he goes off, stars appear. Last week the radiation came from Hilary Benn. At PMQs today it was Angela Eagle who outshone her leader. With Cameron away, George Osborne manned the despatch box but he showed not a flicker of joy or anticipation as he
Jamie Lloyd’s production of Pinter’s The Homecoming is a pile of terrific and silly ideas. Mostly terrific. The action takes place on a raised, thrusting stage surrounded by a steel canopy of scarlet rods like a boxing-ring. Ideal for a play about damaged men competing for a female trophy. Soutra Gilmour’s design is a model
Bomb Syria. That was Cameron’s priority today as PMQs was sidelined in favour of the debate on airstrikes. His opponents’ strategy was ‘Bomb Cameron.’ They demanded a withdrawal of his remark that any opponent of bombing must be a ‘terrorist sympathiser’. The snarliest words came from Alex Salmond whose grey jowls jiggled with rage as
