Lloyd Evans

Lloyd Evans

Lloyd Evans is The Spectator's sketch-writer and theatre critic

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

The real deal

From our UK edition

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.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Pushy mothers

From our UK edition

Weird experiments in stone and glass clutter the South Bank opposite the Tower of London. The near-spherical City Hall looks like a speeding squash ball photographed at the moment of impact with a racquet. Around it stretches an acre of sloping flagstones, ideal for freestyle biking and skateboarding. (Sure enough, both activities are vigorously suppressed by patrols of scowling guards.) Nearby, the Scoop is a roofless amphitheatre fashioned from a crater of layered granite. It’s an eerie and compelling sight, as if a divine whirlwind had ripped deep spirals out of a barren moonscape to produce a huge grooved funnel. As I took my place on a freezing seat, I sensed that the artificiality of the space seems to work against the warmth and intimacy it’s supposed to generate.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Musical mockery

From our UK edition

They’re back. In August the capital fills with bored, dim-witted, half-naked semi-vagrants who have nothing to do here but get in the way of Londoners who do have things to do here. Tourism is an invitation to robbery. If you aren’t going to a place to work, you’re going there to get worked over. The rites of mob travel invert all the natural obligations of xenophilia. Natives become swindlers and their victims happily connive in the evacuation of their own purses. No one objects because it’s understood that a tourist isn’t a visitor in the proper sense. He’s in London but not engaged with it. He’s half here and half at home.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Double sensation

From our UK edition

Loyalty at Hampstead is two sensations in one. First, it’s a sensational drama written by the partner of a key Blair aide, Jonathan Powell, about the build-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Second, it’s a sensational finale to Mr Powell’s career. The author, Sarah Helm, records events unfolding in London and Washington from her unique perspective at the epicentre of world politics, in her bedroom. Overheard phone conversations and a single visit to Downing Street form the entire corpus of her research. To make the thing larky and good fun she splices the tense international negotiations with domestic jinks, flooded pipes, broken burglar alarms, toddlers with bashed bonces, and so on.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Tudor sensibilities

From our UK edition

Kafka, I was informed at school, was a genius. Now that I’ve grown up a bit I can see that my teachers were being typically overgenerous in their estimate of moderate abilities. Kafka was a cartoonist. He’s the Magritte of literature. His outlandish surrealism is so potent that it has succeeded in occupying the imaginations of people who’ve never encountered the work in person. Much of his mystique rests on his name. If he were called King, not Kafka, and Stephen, not Franz, he’d attract far less pious adulation. But he’s all right, Kafka, if you fancy an hour or two of Tremulous Significance. His short story, In the Penal Colony, has been regularly adapted for the stage and at the Young Vic a Palestinian troupe, ShiberHur, is having a crack at it.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Macabre knockabout

From our UK edition

The Royal Court’s at it again. The Royal Court’s at it again. The boss, Dominic Cooke, likes to place his theatre at the disposal of Sloaney young princesses with an itch to write. It’s a great policy — mad, innovative, unpredictable and at times revelatory. Some of these women are seriously talented. Trouble is, Mr Cooke has now glutted the market with a particular brand of upper-class angst. Every month or two we’re invited to witness yet another dark sexual melodrama featuring posh birds in distress. The latest, by Penelope Skinner, takes us to East Anglia where we meet frustrated Becky, two months pregnant, and her elaborately tedious husband John, an eco-prig and all-round worry guts, who’s gone off sex. ‘I don’t want to kill the baby!

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

A day like no other

From our UK edition

Was there ever a PMQs like this? The mood was like a revolutionary court. On the central issue – the judge-led inquiry into the hacking affair – there was general agreement. But the doors of justice have been flung open at last and hosts of other crimes are rushing in to receive an airing. Ed Miliband arrived convinced that he had a killer question for Cameron. Assuming his favourite expression of indignant piety he asked about a specific warning given to Cameron’s chief of staff last February that Andy Coulson, when News of the World editor, had hired an ex-convict to bribe the cops. The effect was feeble rather than fatal. ‘It wasn’t some secret stash of information,’ said Cameron.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Electrifying Spacey

From our UK edition

Was it curvature of the spine? Was it a club foot? Was it just an epic dose of facial acne? We don’t know exactly where, how or in what degree Richard III’s deformities manifested themselves. Was it curvature of the spine? Was it a club foot? Was it just an epic dose of facial acne? We don’t know exactly where, how or in what degree Richard III’s deformities manifested themselves. Nor did Shakespeare. So he just went with a hunch. In Sam Mendes’s modern-dress production, Kevin Spacey offers us Richard as a double paralympian. He has a mini-excrescence, like a junior dinosaur egg, obtruding meekly from the back of his crisply laundered white shirt.

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Miliband takes the battle honours

From our UK edition

Wow. That was a hell of a session. It shouldn’t have been but it was. A few days ago Mr Miliband seemed to be in the dog-house again. Fresh from his Ed Nauseam interview to a TV reporter – when he repeated the same soundbite on public sector strikes about 36 times in a row – he’d been stung by Lord Goldsmith’s complaint that he was failing to connect with the public. But salvation arrived in the shape of News International. The worse things smell at Wapping the rosier it all is for the opposition leader. PMQs today was easy. All he had to do was to appear suitably revolted by the hackers, to demand an inquiry in his sternest whine, and to resume his seat with a self-righteous quiver fading along his lips. But he did far more.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Web exclusive: Review of Spectator debate on secularism, Islam and Christianity

From our UK edition

Secularism is a greater threat to Christianity than Islam Royal Geographic Society June 29th 2011 Chair Rod Liddle   Proposing Fr Timothy Radcliffe OP Damian Thompson Prof Tariq Ramadan   Opposing The Very Rev’d Patrick Sookhdeo Nick Cohen Douglas Murray   Fr Timothy Radcliffe, a Dominican friar based in Blackfriars Oxford, proposed the motion arguing that secularism appeared in ‘strong and weak’ varieties. Weak secularism meant the exclusion of religion from the public sphere. Strong secularism entailed a belief that the only valid truths are the verifiable and falsifiable propositions approved by science. ‘Strong secularism is dangerous.

Lloyd Evans

Nothing earned or learned

From our UK edition

Sir Tom and Sir Trevor — Stoppard and Nunn — have teamed up to realise Sir Trevor’s ‘40-year dream’ of bringing Sir Tom’s breakthrough play to the West End. Sir Tom and Sir Trevor — Stoppard and Nunn — have teamed up to realise Sir Trevor’s ‘40-year dream’ of bringing Sir Tom’s breakthrough play to the West End. I couldn’t make the opening night and Sir T (x 2) had restricted press seats to that performance only so I had to make my own arrangements. What a bunch of highwaymen those ticket agencies are! (I’ll get to the play in a second.) You have to pay for the privilege of paying for the privilege. The fee amounted to 20 per cent of the entire outlay.

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

World battles narcolepsy as wonky Miliband opens up

From our UK edition

Superwonk Ed was back today. For the third week running he tried to nobble Cameron at PMQs by taxing him on some miniscule detail of policy. ‘Of the 163 statutory organisations in the health service’, asked Miliband, ‘how many will be left after the government’s top-down reforms?’ Cameron hadn’t a clue. And even at this early stage a sense of resignation was settling over the watching thousands. Trying to kick the PM with a footling facticule doesn’t play with the general public. It rarely makes the news. It has commentators reaching for lines of speed to keep awake. And the only people it excites are the opposition leader’s all-star team of fact-sifters, gaffe-spotters, Googlers and minutiae-mongers back at Labour HQ.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Making waves | 25 June 2011

From our UK edition

The title Her Deepness is partly satirical, partly reverential. The woman herself, Sylvia Earle, is an American oceanographer and a global campaigner for maritime preservation. She dropped into London last week to collect a medal from the Royal Geographical Society and her visit coincided with a month-long promotion at Selfridges in Oxford Street. The shop decked itself out in deep-sea livery to alert us all to the perils of overfishing. Frogmen patrolled the escalators. Kids cavorted on whale-rides. Cardboard silhouettes of leaping marlin dangled from the ceilings. The shop windows were blazoned with slogans intended to foster alarm. ‘For every shrimp caught, ten other lives are lost.’ ‘In the blink of an eye sea-life could be extinct.

Lloyd Evans

Schiller’s killer Miller

From our UK edition

I bumped into a restoration expert last week. ‘What’s new in heritage these days?’ I asked him. ‘Oh, same old, same old,’ he told me. I bumped into a restoration expert last week. ‘What’s new in heritage these days?’ I asked him. ‘Oh, same old, same old,’ he told me. In similar vein, London has been enjoying a spate of classic revivals on stage. At the Donmar a production of Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love) has been barmily retitled Luise Miller. This promotes a minor character to the protagonist’s role. It incorrectly suggests the atmosphere of Romford roundabouts and roaring hen parties.

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Miliband’s myopia

From our UK edition

The Prime Minister declared war at PMQs today. Not once but twice in the same sentence. ‘We’re at war in Libya and in Afghanistan,’ he said, in a throwaway footnote to some ritual noises about his ‘huge respect for our armed forces.’ Until this historic moment Britain had been engaged in peace-keeping and nation-building in Afghanistan, and in civilian protection and tyrant-bothering in Libya. But now it’s official. We’re mobilised on two fronts. Ed Miliband might have made more of this but he was too busy mentally preparing himself for this week’s shock ambush. This week’s shock ambush wasn’t quite as shocking as it might have been because it had exactly the same three-pronged shape as last week’s shock ambush.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Academic loser

From our UK edition

Here’s the thing. This box-set business. Do you get it? I tried. I failed. But everyone else goes stark raving mad about these fictional treasures. Once you’ve sampled a box set (or boxed-set?), you’re hooked. Here’s the thing. This box-set business. Do you get it? I tried. I failed. But everyone else goes stark raving mad about these fictional treasures. Once you’ve sampled a box set (or boxed-set?), you’re hooked. You won’t be seen again until you’ve visited every corner of the dream kingdom encased within its magical walls. Didn’t happen to me, though. I sat through the first six minutes of The Wire in total bafflement.

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Ed’s not dead

From our UK edition

Crafty old Ed. After a week on death row, he was expected to arrive at PMQs and do the decent thing. Drink down a foaming cup of hemlock and depart the political stage for good. But Ed is made of sterner stuff than many of us realised. He was cunning, passionate and articulate today and his performance will have steadied the nerves of his anxious troops. It all began oddly. As soon as Miliband stood up he was greeted by a slightly over-done chorus of cheers from his backbenchers. This absurdity prompted a burst of satirical catcalling from the Tories. They knew this would be fun. Cameron would run rings around Dead Ed. Miliband’s team of researchers have earned their dough this week.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Crosspatch

From our UK edition

Rupert Everett doesn’t care for critics. Rupert Everett doesn’t care for critics. ‘You see them coming into the theatre,’ he says, ‘like the homeless who’ve lost their soup-kitchen, shuffling in with their plastic bags, deranged and vacant.’ After watching him play Henry Higgins in Pygmalion the reviewers have dumped poor Rupe in the poop. ‘Sad to witness,’ said one. ‘Lacking in intellectual joie de vivre,’ lamented another. ‘Respectable,’ said a third. (I bet that hurt.) And Everett, a leading practitioner of bitchcraft, lashed out and accused his attackers of not being able to afford their own sandwiches.

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Even Ed knew he’d lost

From our UK edition

Cameron made history today. He gave the Speaker a genuine reason to call PMQs to a halt. Usually Mr Bercow pops up two or three times to shout down shouters and to waste time by ordering time-wasters not to waste time. But today protocol obliged him to stop proceedings. A half-hearted punch-up was in progress over government u-turns and the PM was defending his reforms by referring to his favourite Labour ally, the shadow health secretary. If he quotes John Healey much more often Cameron will owe him royalties. Ed Miliband accused the government of lengthening waiting times by abolishing Labour’s targets and Cameron countered by claiming that the figures were misrepresented regularly. "The opposition leader misled the house two weeks ago," said Cameron.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

No laughing matter | 4 June 2011

From our UK edition

A miracle at the Barbican. I reached the venue after a mere half an hour blundering around following directions from helpful staff. The main stage, which is so vast it feels like an open-air theatre, is the result of an alluring misconception of scale. You build a venue the size of the cosmos and you get universal art. But art finds its own measure. If the habitat suits the substance all should be well. The latest delight here is an update of Sheridan’s The School for Scandal directed by Deborah Warner with a very classy cast and an absolute ton of money. Warner, a recent arrival at Obvious Island, wants us to know that today’s fashion-obsessed culture is just like the beau monde of the 18th century. Wow. Not much gets past you, eh, Debs? Everything is a mishmash.