Lloyd Evans

A masterpiece at the National. A masterpiece of persuasion and bewitchment. Croatian word-athlete Tena Stivicic has miraculously convinced director Howard Davies that she can write epic historical theatre. And Davies has transmitted his gullibility to Nicholas Hytner, who must have OK’d this blizzard of verbiage rather than converting it into biofuel and sparing us a hideous Balkans ballyhoo. Certainly the play is conceived on a grand scale. Location: a Zagreb mansion. Timeline: 1945 to 2011. Characters: several generations of clever proles plus one dangling aristo. It opens on a note of sourness and corruption. A blonde Marxist stunnah seduces a top commissar who buys her off with the freehold to a townhouse occupied by some rich bloodsuckers. The snooty vermin are kicked out.

1. The play of the year, by a mile, was Fathers and Sons at the Donmar adapted from Turgenev’s novel. Lindsey Turner directed Brian Friel’s harrowing and exhilarating script with immense visual aplomb. 2. Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be Lionel Bart’s first musical was a sublimely witty look at the Cockney underworld starring Gary Kemp. 3. The Realness A new song-and-dance comedy at Hackney Downs Studio, approached the same material as Fings but with a punchier and more contemporary style. 4. I Can't Sing! The exhilarating title melody of this musical set my nape tingling with static electricity and I was convinced that Harry Hill’s X-Factor spoof would stick around for years. It lasted a matter of weeks. 5.

‘What is a panto?’ I asked my companion at the Hackney Empire’s Saturday matinee. ‘It’s basically a really bad play,’ said Coco, aged five and three quarters. She was there with her older brother and my son to help me appreciate the Christmas frolics. Half an hour in, I feigned confusion over the storyline. ‘People are trying to steal the duck,’ she said. Mother Goose is a parable of wealth and greed set in Hackney-topia where an impoverished family become rich when their champion egg-layer starts to produce bullion instead of breakfast. Menaced by an assortment of harpies and malefactors, they move into a spangly new palace and try to protect their asset from thieving hands.

Bombay is now called Mumbai by everyone bar its residents, whose historic name (from the Portuguese for ‘beautiful cove’) has been discarded for them by their betters. Near the airport a huge advertising board bearing the slogan ‘Beautiful Forever’ overlooks an alp of discarded junk where homeless paupers crouching in tin shacks toil and slave around the clock to earn a meagre bowl of grey, rat-licked gruel. Welcome to the National’s latest attempt to cheer us all up. The verminous scrapheap teems with cocky adolescents, witty thieves, evil moneylenders and struggling mums.

‘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 1980s. The setting is a New York strip joint. A social anthropologist finds a girl in a booth and hires her to describe her daily life. He feeds her banknotes through a slot, like a zoo-keeper giving peanuts to a caged marmoset, and she prattles away at him earning a dollar every 60 seconds. She strongly suspects he’s not a scientist but a self-deluding voyeur who disguises his carnal appetites as an intellectual investigation. Happens a lot, she says to him.

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 hint of cruelty about the anvil jawline and the small unflickering eyes. A deferential Ross gave him an effusive welcome. They sat opposite each other, like bores in a Pall Mall club, in matching armchairs upholstered in blood-red velvet. Arnie compels our attention because his career is unparalleled. He began as a bodybuilder which is technically a sport even though it looks like narcissism communicated to the muscles via steroids and dumb-bells.

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 suit. This strange assault is followed by further peculiarities. Rather than calling the cops, Otto seeks a rapprochement with Jonah and they start a rambling, off-beat friendship. Later we discover that Otto, a Cambridge-educated vicar, has an adult daughter who was crippled in childhood by a road accident, and this detail lends credibility to his desire to befriend and redeem his mugger. But the relevant information arrives far too late.

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 exercise get stranded on a remote islet with no hope of rescue. Their Alcatraz is located in the Lake District, which is known to millions as a dead-safe holiday habitat, and this seems to have unsettled Firth so he crams in extra snags to convince us the castaways’ predicament is genuine. Their skiff has capsized. Killer pike throng the lake-waters. Food supplies are limited to a sausage.