Lloyd Evans is The Spectator's sketch-writer and theatre critic
What a strange PMQs. The house seemed half empty. The tug of elsewhere dominated proceedings. Richard Drax asked the prime minister if ‘prospective members of parliament’ should ever speak in support of terrorism. David Cameron took this cue to rebuke John O’Farrell. Labour’s candidate at Eastleigh has admitted to feeling ‘a surge of excitement’ when
Ever been to a ‘promenade performance’? Barmy, really. The audience is conducted through a makeshift theatre space — often a disused ironworks — where the show is performed in disjointed snatches amid atmospheric clutter. Invariably hopeless as drama, promenade shows can be revealing as social anthropology. They lay bare a secret that lies at the
Ten years ago today, Lloyd Evans joined the anti-Iraq war march in London. Evans had an open mind about the war, until he joined the peace movement and met Bianca Jagger. Here is the piece in full from our archive. I’m bursting with excitement. I can hardly get the words down fast enough. There was
A new play about the banking crisis at the Bush. Writer, Clare Duffy, has spent a year or two badgering financiers and economists with questions about ‘the fundamentals’. ‘What is the value of money?’ she asks. ‘What do we want and need money to be?’ Her play has lots of zing and energy, and opens
Whoosh! Crasshh! Ploophm! Crummppp! The personal attacks came pounding in on David Cameron today. Ed Miliband asked about declining living standards and set about portraying the prime minister as an out-of-touch toff surrounded by plutocratic parasites. He cited the recent Tory Winter Ball where a signed mug-shot of Mr Cameron had been auctioned for the
Quartermaine’s Terms is a period piece within a period piece. It’s set in that part of the early 1960s which was still effectively the 1950s. St John Quartermaine, a shy bumbler, is the oldest and most useless teacher at a Cambridge language school. All his colleagues are lovable freaks. There’s the Jesus-worshipping spinster shackled to
It was cynical. It was shameless. It was low-down politics in every way. But Miliband’s stunt at PMQs very nearly worked. His theme was the reform of housing benefit that will affect those in homes with unoccupied bedrooms. Ed Miliband calls this ‘a bedroom tax’. He kicked off by asking David Cameron about the case
A triple thick dose of chicklit at Hampstead. Amelia Bullmore’s good-natured comedy has three girls sharing a student house in 1983. Those were the days. Back then we received ‘grants’ to attend university, i.e., we were paid to look occupied, like job-seekers and politicians. I’m glad to report that Bullmore accurately evokes the culture and
It was the croc that didn’t snap, the firework that failed to fly, the jeroboam that refused to go pop. Last week, David Cameron’s speech on Europe was supposed to heal a two-decade rift within the Tory family and to set Britain on a bold new course in our relationship with the continent. A week
It’s the size of a Hackney bedsit but the ambience is cosily expensive. Sonia Friedman’s tiny office above the Duke of York’s Theatre in St Martin’s Lane has warm, pinkish lighting and elegant armchairs with thick, deep cushions. The dark wallpaper is obscured by framed posters of hit West End shows. Sprawled across the sofa
Meet Fenton. He’s a psycho. A year or so back he was banged up for murdering a preppy teenage girl in one of America’s less-enlightened southern states. Enter a campaigning congressman, John Daniels, who hopes to teach Fenton to read and write and to help him make something of his ruined life. The opening of
David Cameron’s entrance to the Commons at noon was cheered so ecstatically by his backbenchers that broadcasters decided to run the footage again, straight after PMQs. The Tory cheers redoubled when Ed Miliband rose to quiz the PM. Miliband, however, had discovered a flaw in the prime minister’s position. He probed him on his voting
This was no tantric anti-climax. This was a seismic moment in British politics. David Cameron breezed into a London press conference this morning and proceeded to reshape Europe. The wooden lectern he stood at was pale and municipal. He wore a dark suit and a nice purple tie, and his affable pink chops glowed with
It was like Narnia at today’s inauguration. Half a million Obama fans gathered in Washington to shiver as their leader was sworn in for the second time. (Or the fourth, if you count the fluffed effort in 2009, which had to be repeated later, and the mandatory ceremony conducted yesterday in a nicely heated indoor
A tragicomic curiosity at the Finborough written by Hebridean exile Iain Finlay Macleod. The show opens with James, a young Gaelic-speaker, running an internet start-up in London. Business booms. He grows rich and marries his gorgeous university squeeze. The only snag in his life, and it’s quite a serious one, is that he suffers from
It was written in the faces at PMQs today. Ed Miliband seemed relaxed and happy as he exploited Tory splits ahead of Cameron’s Euro-address on Friday. The PM looked irritable and resigned, like a long-distance hiker whose brand new Timberlands have started chafing just a few yards from his starting point. His conundrum is simple.
Gordon Brown lumbered back into parliament this evening to speak in an adjournment debate at 7.10 pm. Even before dinner he managed to look both over-fed and a bit exhausted. His thick dark hair has grown greyer and longer than when we last saw him barrelling out of Downing Street, in May 2010, having just
Filmic structures are always tricky on stage. David Mamet, an exception, can get away with writing long chains of scenes that last a couple of minutes each. But the theatre prefers to relax, to snuggle down, to linger slowly over every morsel of a many-layered spread. Encountering a screenplay on stage is like receiving a
Seemed a good idea at the time. Ed Miliband decided that the progress report published by the Coalition is a ‘secret audit’. At today’s PMQs he accused Cameron of sneaking it out in order to dodge bad coverage. Poor old Ed. He can’t read the chess-match more than one move ahead. The PM gave the
I wasn’t the only one desperate that Viva Forever! would be a blast. There were hundreds of us eager to leap to our feet and holler through the Spice Girls’ greatest hits as a band of teenage lookalikes led the tribute on stage. Didn’t happen, I’m afraid. The Spice Girls are not in this show.
