Lloyd Evans is The Spectator's sketch-writer and theatre critic
Dynastic affairs and international relations were once a seamless continuum. Royal weddings accompanied peace treaties. An heirless realm was vulnerable to invasion. Botched successions led to war. This is the political context of King Lear but Deborah Warner sets the play in modern times, which muddles everything. Britain in the Dark Ages is represented by
Amadeus by Peter Shaffer is haunted by its own antecedents. Viewers are apt to feel that a new production lacks the beauties they’ve seen, or believe they’ve seen, in previous versions. Director Michael Longhurst opens with a fusion of time zones. The courtiers are attired in silk curtains like proper 18th-century toffs, while the musicians
Early bloopers at PMQs. The session began with Theresa May offering Jeremy Corbyn her congratulations on becoming a grandfather. A mistake. The tribute was due elsewhere. But the improvised hilarities that accompanied this blunder burned up several minutes. Corbyn chose to attack on welfare. Over the last week Labour’s sound-bite factory has supplied their leader
Great subject, terminal illness. Popular dramas like Love Story, Terms of Endearment and My Night With Reg handle the issue with tact and artistry by presenting us with a single victim and a narrative focus that reveals as much about the survivors as about the patient. Crucially, the disease is omitted from the title for
Today it became clear why Corbyn is a lousy politician. He’s too interesting. The variety of life is simply too fascinating for him to prosper on the public stage. In a word, he’s not dull enough to be a statesman. A key attribute of leadership is the readiness to bore oneself, and everyone else, by
Ella Hickson’s new play analyses our relationship with oil using the sketch format. First, there’s a candlelit soap opera set in Cornwall, in 1889, with a lot of ooh-arr bumpkins firing witless insults at each other. Next, a bizarre Persian scene, set in 1908, where a Scottish footman (who uses the celebrated Edwardian colloquialism ‘OK’)
Today we saw government without opposition. At least without opposition in the hands of the Opposition leader. Rambling, disorganised Jeremy Corbyn spent his six questions getting nowhere over the health service. Familiar catcalls were heard on both sides. ‘You wasted billions.’ ‘No we invested billions.’ Mrs May attempted to break the record-book by insisted that
Travesties is a multi-layered confection of art, song, literature and pastiche. Tiny snippets of it are true. In Zurich, in 1917, James Joyce directed a production of The Importance of Being Earnest featuring a British diplomat, Henry Carr, in the role of Algy. Joyce and Carr fell out over the costume budget and became embroiled
Corbs is back. And he’s getting his act together. He showed up at PMQs looking estate-agent smart. White shirt, natty blue suit, a red tie mounting, nearly, to its correct position at the throat. His second landslide victory has suffused him with calmness and authority. As he boasted to Mrs May, his position as leader
Kate Tempest, a 30 year old dramatist and poet, has an appeal that’s hard to fathom. Is it all in the elbows? Like most performers raised on hip hop, she recites with her upper limbs flapping and wiggling as if by remote control. For emphasis she uses that impatient downward flicking gesture, beloved of rappers,
Here are three roles all actors love to play. The drunk (no need to learn your lines), the dementia victim (ditto) and the aristocratic roister-doisterer humping his way through the brothels of restoration London. Nothing quite beats the 17th century. Great costumes, stylish language, shoes that add three inches to your height, and a parallel
No Man’s Land isn’t quite as great as its classic status suggests. At first sight the script is a bit of a head-scrambler because Pinter’s characters are obscure to the point of incoherence. A demented alcoholic, Hirst, is cared for in his Hampstead mansion by two mysterious thugs, or servants, who may be emeritus rent
The Emperor seems like a worthy lesson in Ethiopian history. Haile Selassie’s final days are recounted by a retinue of devoted flunkies. He had valets, chauffeurs, zoo-keepers and door-openers to perform every conceivable chore. Each morning a butler proffered a silver dish loaded with meat from which the emperor fed his exotic pets. A clock-watcher,
Coleridge deemed the narrative structure of The Alchemist perfect. But, I wonder. A landowner quits plague-ridden London and his cunning servants pose as learned sages in order to defraud affluent locals. Ben Jonson’s plotting is certainly adroit. The action takes place in a single location within the span of an afternoon, and this concentration of
Remember how it was? Many fans of Westminster still recall with fondness the happy afternoons when the Tories used to greet Ed Miliband at PMQs with a storm of ironic contempt. Nowadays the Labour-shambles is barely worth a half-hearted jeer let alone a burst of orchestrated scoffing. When Corbyn stands up at the despatch box,
Kenneth Branagh’s obsession with Larry Olivier’s career is becoming such a bizarre act of theatrical necromancy that it deserves to be turned into a drama. Sir Ken and Lord Olivier could be played by the same actor. The Entertainer, written for Larry in 1956 by John Osborne, presents us with a washed-up music-hall star, Archie
Bit early for a lap of honour. At PMQs Mrs May congratulated her government (i.e. herself) on fifty marvellous days in government. And she drew comparisons between her polished style and the Corbyn car-wreck. One view is that the chimpanzees’ tea-party currently posing as Her Majesty’s opposition should remain beneath the attention of Number 10.
In the 1980s, supermarkets stocked a fruit juice named ‘Um Bongo’ with the strapline ‘They drink it in the Congo!’. This is the starting point for Adam Brace’s examination of Britain’s relationship with the Congolese (whose word ‘mbongo’ means money). A group of do-gooding Londoners host a festival to celebrate the Congo’s culture and history
‘European premiere of classic American musical’ is a phrase that deeply alarms the experienced playgoer. As I tootled along to Southwark Playhouse I asked myself why this Rodgers and Hammerstein masterpiece had taken so long to plough its way across the ocean. In 1947 the Broadway prodigies decided to follow up their first two hits,
‘Many people are mourning,’ said Sam West on a BBC panel show discussing the response of the arts world to Brexit. According to West’s figures, ‘96 per cent of those polled were for Remain. Collaboration and connection are our bread and butter.’ The atmosphere of bitterness and anger was palpable at the Edinburgh Festival. I
