Lloyd Evans

Suddenly they’re all at it. Actors, that is, writing plays. David Haig, Rory Kinnear and Simon Paisley Day are all poised to offer new dramas to the public. But someone else has got there first. You may have spotted Phoebe Waller-Bridge playing a secretarial cameo in The Iron Lady. She’s a rangy Home Countries brunette with rosy lips, large inviting eyes and an angular, forthright face that suggests intelligence, amusement and a hint of subversive sexual power. Her immaculate skin is as white as a snowdrop. All in all, she’s perfectly set up for a steady career in frocks and pearls playing Downton gold-diggers and hyperventilating Jane Austen virgins. But she seems to want more, something wilder, something weirder, from her profession.

Chimerica. The weird title of Lucy Kirkwood’s hit play conjoins the names of the eastern and western superpowers and promises to offer a snapshot of both nations just as the baton of economic primacy passes from America’s wizened youth to China’s reborn antiquity. The script has an unusually complex set of creative ambitions. It takes the formula of the romantic comedy, gives it a bittersweet twist, and plants it in the arid terrain of international politics. And it starts as a whodunnit. Joe Schofield, a fêted American photo-journalist, was in Tiananmen Square in 1989 when he shot a few frames of the unknown citizen who halted a Chinese tank in its tracks. Scroll forward 23 years and Joe believes Tank Man is living undercover in America.

Politics is everywhere in Edinburgh. It’s embedded in the architecture of the streets. The New Town, built in the latter half of the 18th century, is a granite endorsement of the Act of Union, a stone pledge of loyalty to Britain’s new Germanic monarchy in London. The layout forms an oblong grid. The horizontals of George Street, Princes Street and Queen Street intersect at right angles with Charlotte Street and Hanover Street. This makes the approximate proportions of a flag. There are rumours that a scheme was proposed to dig two diagonal avenues, meeting in a central X, which would have turned the New Town into a colour-free Union Jack. My hunch is that this is a fantasy dreamed up retrospectively by ingenious nationalists.

Strict bylaws in Edinburgh prevent you from buying off-licence booze after ten at night. You can, however, buy all the sauce you want from ten in the morning. (This may explain why alcoholism is so rare up here.) When midnight tolls, Festival revellers pour forth and fill the air with chanting and singing of variable aesthetic quality, and the only way to get any peace is to lapse into a Valium coma. By day I venture forth with sleepy eyes in search of great art. Lee Kern: Bitter Twitter (Gilded Balloon) wants to unmask the superficial malignity of Twitter. His tactic is to tweet silly questions to silly celebs and to recite their silly replies on stage in an angry voice. This doesn’t take us very far.

This is brilliant. The new play by Oliver Cotton, a 69-year-old actor, is set in New York in 1986. An ageing couple, Joe and Ellie, are practising their ballroom dancing when Joe’s maverick brother Billy comes crashing through the front door. The cops are after him. He was holed up in a Florida hotel when he spotted the Nazi brute who tortured them all at a death-camp during the war. He shot the bastard dead and left him floating in a swimming pool in front of hundreds of gawping witnesses. Then he ran for it. He’s not even sorry. He’s pleased he did it. This is gripping stuff. What next? A hundred options blaze through the mind, not least the possibility that Billy has mistakenly slotted an innocent lookalike. But Cotton fails to elaborate on his marvellous opening.

West End producers are itching to get their hands on the new show at the Bush. Mama Mia’s director, Phyllida Lloyd, takes charge of a script written by the Torchwood actress Cush Jumbo about the world’s first black female celebrity. Josephine Baker was born to wow the crowds. A child cabaret artiste from St Louis, she performed as a chorus girl in New York and then leapt the Atlantic to become the toast of Paris in the 1920s. Aged 19, she was one of the biggest theatrical stars in Europe. She married an Italian count, adopted 12 children, bought a château, went bankrupt, fought for the Resistance during the war, returned to America in the 1950s and became a heroine of the civil rights movement. Cush Jumbo brings a formidable range of skills to the role.

The Ladykillers is back. Sean Foley’s adaptation of the classic Ealing comedy introduces us to a crew of villains who stage a train heist while lodging in the house of a sweet old lady. She discovers their crime and when they try to bump her off she proves indestructible. The 1955 movie makes a huge effort to manage the plot’s credibility. The audience is never quite sure if this is a criminal gang in a comic predicament or comic gang in a criminal one. Sean Foley abjures such nuances and gives us a bunch of clowns in a two-hour slapstick routine. This approach deprives the tale of all its subtlety and shadowy strangeness. Michael Taylor’s complex, expressionist design adds to the sense of artifice. A cast of celebs compete to get the most laughs.

It’s always a problem with Macbeth: what accents to use? The Globe is applying the traditional remedy. Lord and Lady Macbeth come from Epsom. Everyone else comes from Glasgow. This is a highly entertaining production — one of the best at the Globe in recent years — but it’s not entirely perfect. Joseph Millson has pretty much everything you need to play Macbeth, good looks, physical stature, a soldierly bearing and a dash of melancholy. But he has something you don’t need at all. A gift for laughter. He’s such an instinctive comedian that he sends the audience into fits, without noticing it, by accident almost. And in the oddest places, too. Macduff and Lennox arrive at the castle where Duncan lies murdered.