Lloyd Evans is The Spectator's sketch-writer and theatre critic
Health, health, health. Viewers of PMQs must be sick of it by now. Health this, health that. Health, health. On and on. Ad nauseam. Today’s exchanges involved the usual tussle over which Superman can save the NHS. Dave and his virile economy or Ed with his honked out assertions that he’s the patient’s champion? The
‘It’s not as bad as I thought it would be,’ said Norman Mailer to his wife, Norris Church, after reading the first chapters of a novel she wrote in the 1970s. It took her decades to recover from this accolade and the book remained unpublished until 2000. Here’s a two-handed drama she drafted in the
Ironic Tory roars greeted Miliband’s ascent to the vertical at PMQs today. He assumed his habitual spanked puppy look. It’s quite a sight, Ed’s expression of frosty endurance. Part dismay, part weariness, part moral indignation, it makes him look like a nun who’s just discovered her favourite choirboy reading a porn mag. On went the
Arnie mania struck the capital last night. A thousand fans crowded into the Lancaster London Hotel to see Schwarzenegger in conversation with Jonathan Ross. He came bounding on stage, in a Club Class business suit, and peered out at us with a glazed, lipless smile. He has dark tufty hair, an ochre tan, and a
In 1999 the News of the World offered Lloyd Evans £5,000 to destroy Boris Johnson’s career. Here’s the story… Now it can be told. A couple of months ago — following the stitch-up by the News of the World of Lawrence Dallaglio and the 10th Earl of Hardwicke (to name but two of the paper’s victims
Go slow at Dagenham. The musical based on the film about a pay dispute in the 1960s starts as a sluggish mire of twee simplicities. We’re in Essex. Grumbling Cockney wage slaves inhabit cramped but spick-and-span council flats. Russet-cheeked kiddiwinkies are scolded and cosseted by blousy matriarchs married to emotionally reticent beer guts. The doll’s-house
Jonah and Otto is a lost-soul melodrama that keeps its audience guessing. Where are we? The Channel coast somewhere. Indoors or out? Not sure. Near a church maybe? Violence barges in. Jonah, a mouthy scruff, shoves a knife in the face of Otto, a dignified old gent with Big Ears whiskers and a dark, elegant
Was that a pop at Hattie? Ed Miliband began PMQs by evoking the centenary of the Great War. ‘We will all be wearing our poppies with particular pride this year,’ he said. And every eye ran along Labour’s front bench to count off the crimson blooms. Balls, poppy. Miliband poppy. Harman, poppy. No, wait. As
Start with a joke. Neville’s Island. Get it? Laughing yet? Are your ribs splitting into pieces? It’s a cracker, isn’t it? Well it’s a pun, at least, on Devil’s Island. Tim Firth’s play, regarded as a modern classic, premiered 22 years ago in Scarborough: Ayckbourn country, and it shows. Four corporate numbskulls on a team-building
The hypocrisy was breath-taking. The opportunism was scandalous. The lack of principle was extraordinary. All the same, it wasn’t a bad move. Ed Miliband used PMQs to attack the Tories for turning Britain’s borders into a gleaming string of electro-magnetic funfairs that attract hopefuls from across the globe. Cameron planned to pass the buck straight
My father came across Dylan Thomas in a Swansea pub in 1947. ‘Chap over there,’ said one of the regulars ‘is a poet.’ ‘What’s his name?’ asked my father. ‘No idea.’ That Thomas’s celebrity was rather patchy, even in his hometown just a few years before his death, illustrates how much his fame owes to
David Baddiel has turned his movie, The Infidel, into a musical. The set-up is so contrived and clumsy that it has a sweetness all its own. A golden-hearted London cabbie, named Mahmoud, discovers that he was adopted at birth and that his real parents were Jewish. This strikes him as intriguing rather than alarming, and
It didn’t work. But it was a good idea. David Cameron prepared an ambush for Ed Miliband at PMQs today. The trouble was he attacked the Labour leader for a vice he himself has mastered with conspicuous aplomb: question dodging. Miliband is clearly in trouble. He’s using his only remaining strength, the NHS, to prop
The age of ‘ladies first’ is back. Phyllida Lloyd reserves all the roles for the weaker sex, as I imagine she thinks of them, in this hybrid play assembled from Henry IV (i) and (ii). It’s a twin-layered production that poses as a piece of am-dram mounted in a women’s nick. The Donmar has been
It was like the last night of the Proms at PMQs. Miliband stood up to hearty roars—Tory roars—that seemed to go on for minutes. This was the longest and most humiliating ovation of his life. But his throat had been hit by a lurgy and his voice was rasping like a misfiring chainsaw. This impairment
First, a bit of background. Conquering Agamemnon slew his daughter, Iphigenia, in return for a fair wind to Troy. This rather miffed his wife, Clytemnestra, who bashed his head in with an axe when he came swaggering home. Her retribution laid a religious duty on their son, Orestes, to avenge his dad by slaying his
Tim and Andy are back. Their monster hit Evita opens the fully refurbed and re-primped Dominion Theatre, which is built on the scale of an airport terminal and needs a big production to fill it. This is a beautiful version of a show that marks a decline in the Tim and Andy alliance. It hasn’t
Suppose Charles were to reign as a meddlesome, self-pitying, indecisive plonker. It’s a thought. It’s now a play, too, by Mike Bartlett. In his opening scene he bumps off Lilibet, bungs her in a box and assembles the family at Buck House to discuss ‘what next?’ Bartlett imagines them as stuck-up divs. William’s a self-righteous
It’s taken a while but here it is. The Play That Goes Wrong is like Noises Off, but simpler. Michael Frayn’s cumbersome backstage farce asked us to follow the actors’ personal stories as well as their on-stage foul-ups, and the surfeit of detail proved a bit of a brain-scrambler. This is a badly rehearsed thriller
These are your lives. Yard Theatre, until 4 October Tom Cruise. That’s the big offer from a newish venue, the Yard Theatre, lurking on the fringes of Hackney Wick. The 80-seat space is located in an upwardly mobile sprawl of discarded warehouses and asset-stripped factories reinvented as artisan boozers. You can get there by train,
