Lloyd Evans is The Spectator's sketch-writer and theatre critic
Richard III is seriously bad for your health. Any actor will tell you that the part of the ‘bunch-backed toad’ is so physically punishing that the chap in the title role usually ends up being injected with painkillers by the local quack before each show. Or he finds himself in hospital when he should be
No one knows quite why we go. It’s not for the whisky (which is like drinking liquefied peppercorns), or for the shortbread (like eating undercooked biscuit-mix), or for the weather (like walking through a car-wash). Nor does the moaning falsetto of the bagpipes draw us north. But every year, without fail, the London media colony
George Bernard Shaw argued passionately that Britain should create a public health service. And he lived long enough (1856–1950) to become one of its earliest victims. This play from 1906 shows the very best and the very worst of his creative abilities. He had a plan: to strip bare the iniquities of private medicine and
A timely show at the Finborough takes us into the heart of Bashar al-Assad’s terror state. Zoe Lafferty’s verbatim piece gathers evidence from activists and torture victims and flings it straight at us. The result is utterly gruesome and utterly compelling. A fractured, blood-stained snapshot of an ancient monstrosity blundering towards its own funeral. Syria,
OK, I was wrong. I’ve said it a million times but I now realise it’s perfectly feasible. Antique dramas can make sense in a modern location. Nicholas Hytner sets Timon of Athens slap bang in the middle of present-day London. The action begins in a mock-up of the National Gallery’s Sainsbury wing, complete with that
Francis Beckett has come up with an intriguing new brand of political history. The Prime Ministers Who Never Were selects 14 of Britain’s nearly-men and imagines how they’d have fared in the top job. The big beasts are reduced to footnotes and the prat-fallers occupy centre stage. Beckett himself writes the story of Labour in
Michael Frayn is a schizophrenic. His creative personality bestrides the English Channel. When he’s at home he writes traditional West End farces with amusing titles and plenty of jokes. When he sits at his European desk he comes up with dour, static, talk-heavy historical dramas with boring titles and no jokes at all. Democracy, written
Ed Miliband is at his best when at his quietest. He began Prime Minister’s Questions today by repeating a question put to David Cameron shortly before the last election. ‘Why do you want to be Prime Minister?’ Cameron had replied: ‘Because I think I’d be good at it.’ Great surges of Labour mirth greeted that
Fear is a new drama by Dominic Savage and it’s one of the nastiest plays I’ve ever seen. It’s also one of the most scrappily written. Yet the subject matter and the clunky script make it weirdly captivating. We meet a pair of teenage muggers who hang around posh bits of London scoping out victims
Low party interest parading as high political principle. That was the theme of today’s PMQs as the party leaders clashed over the scope and nature of the inquiry into the Libor scandal. David Cameron’s pungent language was intended to reflect public anger at the banks. He spoke of ‘spivvy and illegal activity’ in the City,
A mad leap into the dark on the South Bank. And I’m all for mad leaps into the dark. A big-name cast has been assembled for a new play by an untested writer at the 900-seater Lyttelton theatre. Cripes. Stephen Beresford is a Rada graduate who knows his way around the dramatic repertoire. And he
Lloyd Evans rounds up the highlights of this week’s Spectator debate on the future of the union. The motion was ‘It’s time to let Scotland go’. Margo Macdonald, MSP, opened on a friendly note and declared that she had no plans to fall out with anyone. She wants to preserve Scotland’s ‘social union’ with England.
Ed Miliband was spoilt for choice at today’s PMQs. Scarcely a week goes by without the government reneging on some budget promise, so Labour’s leader had a whole fistful of blunders to consider. Wisely, he took the simplest option and quoted an apologia made by David Cameron on April 11th. ‘I will defend every part
Off to Narnia. Director Rupert Goold has recreated C.S. Lewis’s permafrosted fantasy world in a circus tent moored in Kensington Gardens. And at the height of summer too. An impossible feat. But tons of cash, and many months of preparation, have been sunk into this effort. The show starts with The Wardrobe looming up in
William Hague met Harriet Harman at PMQs. They were like old lovers bumping into each other at a party. The tension had vanished and little remained but warm mutual regard. Harman led on health rationing and Hague chose not to retaliate, as Cameron surely would have, by demanding to know why she hadn’t mentioned the
When should you set Antigone? Apparently not in the time of Antigone. The greatest classics these days seem to be aimed at the stupidest ticket-holders. And these hapless wretches can’t possibly be expected to understand anything outside their immediate experience. Polly Findlay’s version of Sophocles’ tragedy doesn’t even get modernity right. Her slightly out-of-date set
I got lost about two minutes into PMQs today. Or maybe sooner. Jeremy Hunt’s in trouble over that old business again. And Baroness Warsi has breached the ministerial code but hasn’t resigned. So Ed Miliband wanted to know why Warsi has been referred to someone or other and Hunt hasn’t. And David Cameron said it
It’s all Kenneth Halliwell’s fault. By bashing in Joe Orton’s head with a hammer, he brought the playwright’s career to a premature halt when Orton was still experimenting with brittle and anarchic farces. Had Orton lived beyond 34, he’d have developed his technique and become a richer, truer and more rounded artist. And What the
I’m not the biggest fan of Neil Simon, I admit it. In the programme notes for The Sunshine Boys, I discovered that Time magazine once called him ‘the patron saint of laughter’. Good, I thought. When the curtain goes up I’ve got someone to pray to. The show opens with Danny DeVito slumped in a
Ed Miliband had it easy at PMQs today. The government is bleeding in all directions. And a further haemorrhage has arrived in the shape of Adrian Beecroft, a government adviser, whose proposal to relax employment law has delighted the Tory right and incensed the soft-and-cuddly Lib Dem left. ‘A proposal to fire at will’, is
