Lloyd Evans is The Spectator's sketch-writer and theatre critic
I take no pleasure in saying this but the director of the National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner, appears to have lost his sense of propriety. Or possibly the balance of his mind. He’s asked John Hodge (author of the Trainspotting screenplay) to write a sitcom about the Great Terror. And, rather than bunging it in the
Hot summer, drippy autumn. Ed Miliband’s performances have declined steeply after the heady highs of July. He came to PMQs today badly needing to fight like a champion. Things looked rosy for him at the weekend. And they got better overnight. We learned that a pilot scheme to fast-track incoming tourists last summer had allowed
Long may it lie in ruins. Wilton’s Music Hall, in the East End of London, is a wondrous slice of Victoriana which exploits its failing grandeur to the max. All visitors are implored to find a couple of quid for the restoration effort. But decay and dilapidation are the best things about it. Every wrinkled
Last night, as we mentioned yesterday and the day before, was The Spectator’s debate on whether Britain should cut its overseas aid budget. Here, for CoffeeHousers who couldn’t attend the event, is Lloyd Evans’ review of it: Chair: Rod Liddle Proposing: Ian Birrell, Richard Dowden, Stephen Glover Opposing: Prof Paul Collier, Alan Duncan MP,
The Hair Shirt walked abroad at PMQs today. Those attending the Square Mile sleepover finally forced their agenda into the political mainstream. The question is, what is their agenda? A protest that doesn’t define its programme allows others to define it for them. And today both party leaders tried to harness the anti-capitalist spirit for
It sounds like mission impossible. To celebrate this year’s 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, the RSC set itself the task of mounting a play about the controversies surrounding the translation. A drama, therefore, entirely lacking in drama. No action or spectacle, no romance or comedy, no surprise twists or last-minute poisonings. Just people
Fashionable Londoners go to the Donmar Warehouse to engage in shut-eye chic. It’s a weird way to relax. You buy a ticket to John Osborne’s 1964 classic, Inadmissable Evidence, and you sleep through most of its two and a half hours. All around me were seats full of happy dozers. How I envied them. Mind
Easy-peasy at PMQs today. All Ed Miliband had to do was slice open the Coalition’s wounds on Europe and dibble his claws in the spouts of blood. But his attack had no sense of bite or surprise. And his phraseology was lumpen. He used all six questions gently stroking the issue of Europe rather than
At last, it’s reached the West End. Lee Hall’s hit play, The Pitmen Painters, tells the heartening tale of some talented Geordie colliers who won national acclaim as artists during the 1930s. Hall, who wrote Billy Elliot, has done extremely well from a pretty limited set of dramatic techniques. He draws each of his coal
Alive or dead? At PMQs today we discovered whether Dr Fox is still an active toxin within Cameron’s government. Ed Miliband, using that special quiet voice he likes to try when he’s got a deadly question, described the affair as ‘deeply worrying’, and asked how on earth the prime minister could have let it all
Here’s an idea from the heyday of radio comedy. A soap star about to get the chop improvises an unscripted deathbed recovery during a live broadcast in order to save his career. I think it was Tony Hancock who starred in that sketch. To expand it into a full-length play would be quite a challenge.
The theatre world is abuzz with rumours that Michael Boyd, director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, has quit this afternoon. He was appointed in July 2002 and was expected to complete at least a decade in charge. His colleague Vikki Heywood is also expected to resign. Boyd will probably be best remembered for overseeing the
Riots at theatres, commonplace before the Great War, have mysteriously gone out of fashion. J.M. Synge’s classic, The Playboy of the Western World, was disrupted many times during its opening week in 1907 by Dubliners who objected to its portrayal of the rural poor in the west of Ireland. Strange that, feigning outrage on behalf
Lloyd Evans talks to the warm, vibrant, vegetable-growing actor, teacher and director Caroline Quentin Terminal fear. Rising nausea. And possibly vomiting. That’s what Caroline Quentin expects to go through on the opening night of her new play, Terrible Advice, at the Menier Chocolate Factory. ‘I’m really pretending it’s not happening at the moment,’ she tells
It’s a record breaker. The Trafalgar Studio is staging a rare revival of Christopher Hampton’s breakthrough play, written when he was 18, which made him in 1966 the youngest writer ever to have his work staged in the West End. This record has now stood for so long that it could probably do with a
Even the cover is a mystery. Julian Assange’s memoir carries a contradictory, if eye-catching, title: the unauthorised autobiography. On his WikiLeaks site the author disclaims authorship altogether. ‘I am not “the writer” of this book. I own the copyright of the manuscript which was written by Andrew O’Hagan.’ He claims that the text was ‘distributed
A world première at the Almeida. My City written and directed by Stephen Poliakoff. Is it any good? Well, let’s see. Plot, first. It’s not that Poliakoff can’t write a plot; he can’t even think one up. Instead he sets himself a high-minded riddle and examines its possibilities. Take an archetype, ‘the kid-fearful-of-the-dark’, turn it
Christopher Booker, of the Sunday Telegraph, proposed the motion by taking a blast at his own side. Christopher Booker, of the Sunday Telegraph, proposed the motion by taking a blast at his own side. The present Euro crisis had inspired Tory Eurosceptics to talk of “a re-negotiation” and a “repatriation of powers”. This, he said,
‘John Smith is dead.’ These four blunt syllables, as elemental and atmospheric as the first line of a classic novel, form the opening of Chris Mullin’s new collection of diaries. This is a fascinating read, crammed with gossip, jokes, insights and anecdotes, not all of them political. Mullin’s first disclosure is that the ‘decent interval’
Well done, the Royal Court. It’s got the art of audience abuse down to a tee. The queue for the tiny studio theatre snakes up an airless flight of stairs and bottlenecks into a doorway where each play-goer receives a personalised earbashing from an usherette. ‘Hello, did you hear all that? It’s one hour straight
