Lloyd Evans

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. And in the 1960s Frank Marcus, a showbiz journalist, took on the job. And he struck gold. The Killing of Sister George triumphed in London and on Broadway. Now it’s back with a cast of starry comediennes. Sister George, a district nurse, is the leading character in a popular Radio 4 soap opera. One day, on a whim, the BBC execs decide to bump off the character.

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 enormous refit of the main theatre in Stratford. The renovated space, with its thrust stage, opened its doors in November 2010 and has been judged a huge success. Boyd has also shown himself adept at the do-gooding jargon of top public officials. He talks of the Bard’s new home in Stratford as if it were a drop-in centre for junkies. He describes it as ‘a chance to build a contingent, optimistic community.

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 through. No readmission. No recording. No photography. No mobile phones. No sitting on the reserved chairs. No treading on the floor on the way to your seat. Enjoy the show. Hello, did you hear all that...?’ and so on. The floor we mustn’t tread on is strewn with a layer of sacred grit which the director insists will remain untouched by human sole before the show begins.

Lloyd Evans meets Tara FitzGerald and is struck by her uncanny beauty and her desire to hear what he thinks Tara FitzGerald’s beauty is fabulous. Literally, there’s something unworldly about the surfaces and contours of her face. It’s as if the codes of her biology had been transmitted to earth from a higher realm, from alien beings. The wide cheekbones are angular yet softly curvaceous. Her eyes have a luminous purity, a revelatory greenness. Her dark hair glows, and her immaculate skin is invitation-card white. She speaks in a low, smokily textured voice that occasionally surges into a throaty giggle. I meet her at the Tricycle theatre in Kilburn where she’s currently starring alongside Antony Sher in Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass.

Anna Christie, an early Eugene O’Neill play, has brought Jude Law to the tiny Donmar Warehouse. Set in New York among migrant longshoremen, the script takes ages to get to the point. Mat Burke, a randy Oirish loon, wants to marry Anna, a winsome worldly blonde, but faces opposition from her narky, knife-wielding dad, Chris. But never mind the drama, listen to the accents. Jarring phonetics dominate the stage. David Hayman’s Chris spits out gnarled Scandinavian curses. ‘I svair to Gott, Anna, I don’t font hear it.’ Ruth Wilson’s Anna has a hard-to-place American accent which harbours many a stowaway syllable. And Law, playing de Oirishman, speaks a dialect that’s packed with extra fruity flavours.

Lloyd Evans mingles with sozzled Scots, benumbed punters and performers with nothing to lose at this year’s Fringe It’s for losers, Edinburgh. The world’s down-and-outs come here in droves every August. This year I was one of them. Having failed to secure my usual lodging, a spartan cell on the university campus, I had to book a backpackers’ refuge on the Royal Mile. It was better than a park bench. Just about. The website promised ‘fitted sheets’ and ‘lounge with real fire (gas/coal effect)’ as tokens of its commitment to luxury. I rented a towel (20p, no deposit), which turned out to be fairly clean on one side. The accommodation was rammed. Six rooms, eight bunks each. Nearly 50 of us sharing four showers. No soap.

The Cambridge Footlights (King Dome) have a lot going for them. Poise, brains, clean-cut looks, nice accents and privileged status at the Edinburgh Fringe as keepers of a sacred flame. But in reality these advantages count against them. Audiences know that comedy comes from a paranormal neverland, from damaged grotesques, from halting, slobbering outsiders. Comedy is unpleasant. And these boys are anything but. So it takes them a while to convince us that they’re the real deal and not some artful muck-about from the college quad. Their comedic sources are obvious. Movie spoofs, workplace mix-ups. And much of their material defies current political orthodoxies. A joke about the Jamaicans not being able to muster an army feels distinctly weird.