Lloyd Evans

The Vaults at Waterloo are gallantly trying to pose as the party spot for hipsters in the world’s coolest city. Brickwork alone may frustrate this goal. The venue is half-buried in a warren of arches beneath the western approaches to the terminus. The foyer is scruffy, poorly lit, and its dank air is scented with mildewed plaster and decaying concrete. It stinks, to be blunt, of tuberculosis. The auditorium features balding velvet pews salvaged from a condemned Odeon. Each seat receives its burden with a groan of reluctance. Every few minutes a train passing overhead rattles out a tom-tom beat. This is the unpromising location for King Kong (A Comedy), which turns the 1933 horror flick into a satirical cartoon.

Hand it to the Americans. They know how to hype a young talent to death. The latest to be asphyxiated by the literary establishment is Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. He’s written six off-Broadway plays (one adapted from a script by Boucicault), and won a ton of awards and prize money. Most of the English ‘critics’, if one can call them that, have meekly regurgitated the American propaganda. Gloria, which was nominated for the Pulitzer, now arrives at Hampstead. The setting is a snobbish New York magazine, which is absolutely and emphatically not the New Yorker, according to Jacobs-Jenkins. (Before turning to drama, he worked at the New Yorker for three years.

Anatomy of a Suicide looks at three generations of women in various phases of mental collapse. They line up on a stage that resembles a grey dungeon while sad events unfold around them. The first woman gets pregnant. The second takes heroin. The third argues with a lesbian about a fish. Their lives span several decades but their stories are presented simultaneously, and this tripartite method conceals the plain fact that the events dramatised are too flimsy to merit theatrical portrayal. A soap opera would baulk at such scenes: a druggie teenager bores a cameraman with a list of gloomy soundbites; a female wedding guest is partially seduced by a giggling gatecrasher; a patient in a hospital invites a nurse to eat some haddock.

The National Theatre could hardly resist Barber Shop Chronicles. The play shines a light on a disregarded ethnic community, black urban males, who like to hang around in barber salons seeking friendship, laughs and tittle-tattle. Setting the play in a single venue would just be a sitcom, like Desmond’s, so the show establishes a series of shops stretching from London to the capitals of various sub-Saharan nations. This makes it a global epic. In theory, at least. In fact, it’s still a sitcom with some melodramatic bits on the end. The disjoined structure is tiresome at first as the action keeps legging it from Britain to Nigeria and Ghana and back again. Inevitably, the intellectual level is pretty undemanding, somewhere between music-hall and panto.

Sand in the Sandwiches is the perfect show for those who feel the West End should be an intellectual funfair. It sets out to amuse, surprise, divert, uplift and nothing more. Edward Fox’s biographical portrait of John Betjeman has a smattering of his most famous poems ingeniously woven into the narrative. Fox knows his stuff. His shrill, elongated upper-middle-class accent is 99 per cent impersonation and 1 per cent exaggeration. He reminds us that when Betjeman said ‘Edwardian’ he rhymed the second syllable with card, not sword. From early boyhood Betjeman knew that poetry would be his trade. Aged 14, he read the sonnets of Oscar Wilde’s chum, Bosie, and judged them superior to Shakespeare’s. He sent the ageing poet an admiring letter.

Georg Büchner, a justly neglected German playwright, died at the age of 23 leaving a half-finished script about a mad soldier and his cheating girlfriend. This relic has fascinated dramatists ever since because Büchner is regarded as a visionary left-wing artist cruelly stolen before his time. (Not a moment too soon, if you ask me.) Jack Thorne is the latest to rehash the leftovers. It’s 1981 and we’re in a divided Berlin. We meet a mopey British squaddie, Woyzeck, who shares a flat with his girlfriend from Derry who has the voice of a seagull and the personality of a dishcloth. The flat pongs because it’s located over a slaughterhouse. Bad choice. Let’s move, says Woyzeck. Great, says the Bogside dishcloth. This starts the story.

The Olivier describes Salomé by Yaël Farber as a ‘new’ play. Not quite. It premièred in Washington a couple of years ago. And I bet Farber was thrilled at the chance to direct this revival at the National’s biggest and best equipped stage. She approaches the Olivier’s effects department like a pyromaniac in a firework factory. She wants everything to go off at once. And it does. Goatherds yodel. Bells bong. Flutes warble. Birds parp. A revolving conveyor belt twirls spare actors around the stage in dizzy circles. Chord surges swell and fade on the soundtrack. Kneeling shepherdesses sift mounds of soap powder into mahogany salad bowls.

Jez Butterworth’s new play The Ferryman is set in Armagh in 1981. Quinn, a former terrorist, has swapped the armed struggle for a farming career and now lives with his sick wife, their countless kids, his sister-in-law and her only son. But the IRA, who murdered his brother as punishment for his disloyalty, are due to pay a visit with unknown intentions. More violence, perhaps? Protection money? Or both. Well, neither, it turns out. They merely want Quinn to refrain from blaming his brother’s death on them. Rather a low price to ask. And yet Quinn is willing to defy them even though he knows they repay disobedience with murder, and he now has a dozen vulnerable dependents to protect. These plot elements don’t quite stack up.

Obsession at the Barbican has a complicated provenance. The experimental Belgian director Ivo van Hove adapted the show from a Visconti film based on the novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. This version originated in Amsterdam and was rendered into English by a London playwright. The story mixes surrealism with torrid carnality. Sexy Hannah is married to nasty Joseph, who runs a failing hotel. Hunky Gino (Jude Law) seduces Hannah. Let’s elope, he suggests. No, says Hannah. Gino hangs around the hotel mending a truck engine parked by Joseph in the foyer. Gino gets the engine working and it soars upwards and hovers 30 feet in the air. But even with a miraculous levitating engine to attract the punters, the hotel remains empty.

Left-wing groupie Paul Mason has written a costume drama about the suppression of the Paris commune in 1871. We meet Louise Michel and her all-female gang of arsonists as they’re carted off to jail for setting fire to the Tuileries. After a harsh stint in the cells, they’re shipped out to the French colony of New Caledonia, in the eastern Pacific, where they live in an open prison. Things aren’t too bad. They mingle with the natives, enjoy the local hooch, and sing comradely songs about ‘spilling the blood impure’. Escape is on the agenda. A committee of anarchists is said to be making swift progress across the ocean in a rescue ship.

Christopher Hampton’s 1968 play The Philanthropist examines the romantic travails of Philip, a cerebral university philologist, forced to choose between his unexciting fiancée and a predatory seductress. The play’s opening scene contains one of the most brilliant comic shocks in all drama. And the paradoxes and flashes of Hamptonian wit are an everlasting treat. ‘I’m a man of no convictions,’ says Philip. ‘At least I think I am.’ The production, brilliantly directed by Simon Callow, is exquisite to look at. Libby Watson creates a stark white sitting room, with great pools of crimson carpet, enlivened by colourful rows of books that are harmonised carefully, but not obtrusively, with the overall palette.

Even the Bard’s staunchest fans admit that ‘Shakespeare comedy’ may be an oxymoron. That’s the assumption of the touring company Shit-Faced Shakespeare, which produces the plays as adventures in boozy slapstick. The audience is encouraged to swig along too. I saw their hooch-assisted Much Ado. The colourful costumes looked a bit am-dram, perhaps deliberately, and the stage was decorated with cheap flapping drapes on which gargoyles, arches and other medieval devices had been painted. Enter a larky compère in puffy breeches carrying a horn. ‘PARP PARP’. He announced that a member of the cast had just consumed two beers and half a litre of gin in the dressing room. Which is quite a lot.

It’s like Raging Bull. The great Scorsese movie asks if a professional boxer can exclude violence from his family life. Nina Raine’s new play Consent puts the same question to criminal barristers. We meet four lawyers engaged in cases of varying unpleasantness who like to share a drink after a long day in court. They gossip about the more horrific behaviour of their clients with frivolous and mocking detachment. But when their personal relationships start to falter under the strains of infidelity, they’re unable to relinquish their professional expertise, and their homes become legalistic battlefields. This sounds like a small discovery but Raine turns it into a grand canvas.

Don Juan in Soho rehashes an old Spanish yarn about a sexual glutton ruined by his appetite. Setting the story in modern London puts a strain on today’s play-goer, who tends to regard excessive promiscuity as a disease rather than a glamorous adventure. And the central character, a vulgar aristocrat named DJ who grades everyone on a scale of ‘fuckability’, contravenes the sentimental egalitarianism of our current sexual code. Writer Patrick Marber offers us a version of London where the social structure of the Regency still endures. Educated Englishmen are the only fully evolved human beings. Beneath them swarms an amusing underclass of thick, greedy motormouths from whom the Englishman must recruit his prostitutes and servants.