Lloyd Evans

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 the Crucible or a steward on a Virgin train. Scott is known as a ‘character actor’ (code for ‘baddie’) rather than a leading man.

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 the 1920s. We meet a couple of vaudeville veterans, Queenie and Burrs, whose romance has hit the rocks. To rekindle the flame they invite everyone they know around for a party. Hang on. A party? Booze, drugs, flirtation, seduction: the recipe for destroying a romance, not salvaging it. But never mind. The guests have started to arrive, direct from the Scott and Zelda Tribute Society. Everyone is talented, sophisticated and glamorously tragic.

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 one of the caring professions. And it attracts operatives of any age, creed or physical configuration. An elegant 67-year-old rent boy explains, with touching humour, that his clients tend to be married men who just happen to be interested in fellatio. ‘Will you put your penis inside my body?’ a shy punter once asked him. ‘Yes, that’s more or less what I do.’ He works in the afternoons. In the mornings he has a cleaning job.

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 young burglar who gets beaten up and flung through a window by a woman of 71. The ending is more of a petering out than a conclusion. All the characters feel interchangeable apart from the nurse, who claims to come from Cheltenham. Her name, Hope Daly, prompts one of the old dears to quip. ‘My life in a nutshell.’ Later Hope admits, ‘I’m from Croydon, OK? I don’t tell people because I don’t need the pity.

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 flunked out of secretarial college after suffering the embarrassment of vomiting over her type-writer. She now pines away at home forming sterile friendships with a colony of animal statuettes lodged in a glass case. This set-up has the delicious simplicity of a comedy sketch. The conflict between the unstoppable mother and the self-effacing daughter promises fun galore.

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 Russian duke. All the womenfolk promptly fall in love with him, including Grazia, who sets out to bag the mysterious foreigner. Where can this strange plot go next? Nowhere. Once Grazia learns that Death has come to terminate her existence the story will end. So the script is padded out with additional entanglements between a sprawling crew of sub-personalities.

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, who alerts his shifty brother and calls in the cops as well. A loquacious twerp, Inspector Clout, arrives to investigate and the tangled narrative starts to unfold. This is an uneven play but the good bits are excellent. Stephen Boxer is amusingly deranged as the hallucinating frog man. The animal-rights activists are wittily portrayed as misanthropic nuisances.

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 is limited and the characters never challenge our expectations. The setting is Kabul in the 1970s. We meet nice Amir, a personable everyman, whose family have foreseen the rise of theocratic despotism and are plotting to escape. We hope they do. We’re attracted to Amir’s garrulous, whisky-drinking dad. ‘All crime is a form of theft,’ he philosophises. We find the psychotic street bully Assef utterly appalling.

God, what a dusty old chatterbox Schiller is. Like Bernard Shaw, he can’t put a character on stage without churning out endless screeds of cerebral rhetoric. But unlike Shaw, he has no sense of humour, nor any instinct for the quirks and grace notes that create a personality. Mary Stuart is a psychological drama with a single issue. How soon, and with what political consequences, can Elizabeth execute her treacherous cousin Mary? Schiller’s characters sound and feel identical: super-brainy, highly confident know-alls who treat each problem like a gang of Chancery briefs discussing a particularly knotty insolvency case. Director Robert Icke’s regimented production imposes high-street fashions on England in the 1560s.

Hedda Gabler is one of the most influential plays ever written. It not merely illuminated an injustice, the enslavement of women within marriage, it fomented the revolutionary achievements of feminism. It deserves to be done as Ibsen intended. This updated version from Ivo van Hove locates Hedda in one of those posh urban dream homes that resemble an art gallery. Stage left, buckets filled with flowers. Centre, an abandoned plinky-plonk piano. At the rear, a lamp the size of a traffic bollard. Scruffy off-white masterpieces deck the walls. Everything looks chic and scaled-up. Tesman is a penniless American academic married to tetchy Hedda who pads about barefoot, in her nightie, grousing. Effortful gestures abound.