Lloyd Evans

A new Seagull lands in Regent’s Park. Director Matthew Dunster has lured Chekhov’s classic into a leafy corner of north London to see if it needs an upgrade. The new script, by yuppie-baiting playwright Torben Betts, is casual, slangy and sometimes gauche. Favourite moments have been struck out including the great opening line, ‘Why do you always wear black?’ And Betts decides to make Chekhov’s characters swear. ‘Bollocks’, ‘piss off’. I don’t know Russian but I’m sure Chekhov didn’t need coarse language to portray coarse souls. The outside staging has been jazzed up too. A clunking great mirror hangs over the playing area like a bit of broken satellite.

Ho hum. Bit icky. Not bad. Hardly dazzling. The lukewarm response to An Audience With Jimmy Savile has astonished me. This is the best docudrama I’ve seen on stage. From the early 1970s, Britain swooned before Savile. Marketing pollsters found him the country’s best-loved celeb (bar the Queen Mum). He enforced his influence by winning over several establishments at once, the royals, the Beeb, the NHS, the media, the charity sector, Westminster. Evidence of his criminality existed but it never affected his reputation. He’s the nearest we’ve come to Hitler. The show takes the format of a TV biography which is intercut with scenes from Savile’s early life and testimony from his victims. Alistair McGowan’s ownership of Savile’s persona is astounding.

For nine years Patrick Marber has grappled with writer’s block (which by some miracle doesn’t affect his screenplay work), but the pipes are now ungummed and wallop! his new bolus of creativity splatters across the Dorfman stage. It’s a wordy three-hander set in the swamp of non-league football. Marber brilliantly captures the grubbiness and despairing optimism of ageing sportsmen who inhabit a golden age that never was. We meet Kidd, a hopeless but garrulous manager, as he tussles with Yates, a lugubrious old kit-man, for a controlling stake in a dazzling young talent, Jordan. The emotional terrain is lifted directly from Pinter and Mamet: male losers fighting over scraps of nothing.

King John arrives at the Globe bent double under the weight of garlands from the London critics. Their jaunt up to Northampton for the première seems to have cast an opiate glaze over their faculties. Plays that are rarely revived earn their hermit status for a reason. They lack social skills or winning graces. They’re hard to get on with. Shakespeare launches his account of the bad king’s ‘troublesome raigne’ by exploring the shadowy crenellations of Plantagenet genealogy. A decent cast performing at full whack to an eager crowd couldn’t keep my brain engaged. After 70 minutes, the folds of my eyes were feeling as heavy as piano lids. Then, a sensation. A scene of extraordinary force and daring.

In October 2011 anti-capitalist vagrants built an open-air squat outside St Paul’s within shrieking distance of London’s financial heart. The City thrummed all night with the dob-dob-dob of bongo recitals while the rebels held angry debates beneath their plastic canopies and declared the Square Mile knee-deep in ordure. To press the point they used nearby alleys for their ablutions. This half-forgotten protest has become a play in which the central figure, the dean, has to choose between evicting and accommodating his crusty tenants. Conscience informs him that the noisy campers are Christ’s spiritual heirs. But temporal responsibility obliges him to heed his Square Mile parishioners and sweep the ragamuffins from the City’s doorstep.

St James Theatre hosts a new play about Alexander McQueen (real name Lee), whose star flashed briefly across the fashion world before his suicide in 2010. It opens with a mysterious stalker, Dahlia, breaking into McQueen’s Mayfair home and demanding that he make her a dress. ‘I’m calling the police,’ he shrieks but she placates him and they embark on a surreal odyssey to his childhood haunts where they meet his mentors past and present. A pretty clunky start. Who is Dahlia? A dramatic ploy, a figment of McQueen’s imagination or a real person? We don’t know so we don’t care about their relationship. Still less about her flipping dress.

Here come the Yanks. As the summer jumbos disgorge their cargoes of wealthy, courteous, culture-hungry Americans, the West End prepares to bag a fortune. Death of a Salesman is just the kind of timeless post-war classic that Americans adore, isn’t it? Not quite. Arthur Miller is mistrusted in his homeland. For starters he was a closet pinko who kept the closet door wide open. He was wooed by Hollywood but spurned every inducement. He married Marilyn Monroe and failed to make her happy. And top of the chargesheet is this play, which proposes that the American dream is a con, a swindle, a diabolical cruelty that hounds mortals to death by engorging their bellies with fantasies of happiness. It’s a superb artefact but relentlessly uncomfortable to sit through.

If Julian, Dick, George and Anne had become terrorists they’d have called themselves The Angry Brigade. It’s such a Wendy house name. The quartet of violent outcasts met in a Camden squat in the late Sixties and moved to Stoke Newington where they rented a house to deflect unwanted attention. They began planting bombs around London in the hope of jerking the proles from their consumerist trance and sparking a communist war. They preferred catchy locations for their fireworks: the Albert Hall, a BBC film unit, an MP’s garden. And it took the cops ages to track them down and sling them in jail. James Graham’s new play uses a neat staging device. There are four terrorists and four detectives, and the same actors play both hunters and quarry.

David Mamet is Pinter without the Pinteresque indulgences, the absurdities and obscurities, the pauses, the Number 38 bus routes. American Buffalo, from the 1970s, is one of Mamet’s early triumphs. Don is a junkshop owner who believes a customer cheated him over a rare nickel so he gets his young pal Bob to steal it back. An older friend, Teach, persuades Don to ditch Bob and let him commit the burglary. That’s it. That’s all that happens in this narrow, gripping thriller, which takes the brutal male culture of the Wild West and imports it to the Chicago slums where three lonely outcasts fight desperately for scraps of cash and friendship. On paper it all sounds grey, miserable and petty. On stage it’s magnificent, multicoloured, vast and tragic.

Writers and producers have shown little appetite for putting the coalition on stage. Several reasons suggest themselves. In 2010 wise pundits assured us all that the Rose Garden duo would squabble and part long before the five-year term expired, and theatre folk were persuaded not to gamble on a ship that might sail at any moment. And the conduct of parliamentarians has been pretty unhelpful to dramatists. Chastened by the expenses scandal, MPs have reinvented themselves as models of probity and self-restraint. The Commons has been all but free of sin. Eric Joyce cracked a few skulls. Nadine Dorries bunked off for a fortnight in the jungle. The occasional ex-minister has been caught hustling undercover hacks for a day or two’s work. Even the cabinet have behaved like nuns.