Lloyd Evans is The Spectator's sketch-writer and theatre critic
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Crack! The sound of the whips lashing Labour MPs into line today was deafening. And the truth didn’t have a prayer. What a draining, depressing, undemocratic spectacle it was to see Labour’s doomed time-servers put in yet another shift at the government’s whopper-factory. Cameron went to the House with a single tactic, to get the
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The Winter’s Tale Old Vic Phèdre Lyttelton I seem to be alone in feeling great waves of pity for anyone involved in an assault on The Winter’s Tale. This strange dud of a text remains mystifyingly popular with theatre folk. It’s two plays shunted together. Act one is a mawkish palace tragedy, act two is
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Usually it’s the war-dead who overshadow the start of PMQs. Today it was the undead. Brown is back and if the Labour rebels really believed his promise to ‘listen’ their trust seems to have been misplaced. This was the Brown of old, the unbudgeable slab of granite, the obsessive numerologist casting statistics in all directions
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Hamlet Wyndhams Arcadia Duke of York’s ‘No one can do the definitive Hamlet. It’s too big for that. But you can do an enormous amount.’ Wise words. Jude Law’s as it happens. All Hamlets fail and it’s a great tribute that Law’s fails remarkably little. His stage presence is thrilling, intense and highly athletic, and
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Would you Adam and Eve it? The Prime Minister actually seemed to enjoy PMQs today. With the whole of Westminster abuzz with whispered plots and covert knife-sharpenings perhaps the Commons seemed a haven of openness and civility by contrast. Brown got off to a lousy start though. He stuttered and fumbled through the names of
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Amongst Friends Hampstead Taking Sides/Collaboration Duchess Who wrote the first ‘dinner party from hell’ drama? Shakespeare had a couple of stabs with Titus Andronicus and the banquet scene in Macbeth where Banquo’s ghost arrives to ruin a perfectly good evening. Ovid told of Procne who killed her son, Itys, and served him up in a
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A Doll’s House Donmar The Observer Cottesloe Amazing guy, Ibsen. Still scribbling away at the age of 181, the Norwegian genius has teamed up with under-rated Spooks writer Zinnie Harris to create a new version of A Doll’s House. They’ve shifted the setting from 19th-century Norway to London in 1909 and promoted Thomas from the
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Duet for One Vaudeville Ordinary Dreams Trafalgar Studio Therapy is celebrity by another name. An artificially created audience bears witness to your anguish and joy and enables you to resolve the terrible contradiction that underpins every human being’s world-view. Each of us, in his gut, feels like the star of his life. But in his
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The Speaker presided over his own memorial service today. The PM led the tributes by reminding us that Michael Martin had spent thirty years living off the rest of us – sorry – contributing to public life. Cameron said thanks for the help he received as a parliamentary fresher in 2001. Even wobbly-jowled Tory shiresman
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A quiet, chastened, nervous House of Commons today. Like a bunch of naughty schoolboys caught wrecking the art-block and forced to clean it up. The Prime Minister, looking even more dank and grotty than usual, faltered as he recited the names of last week’s war dead from Afghanistan. By contrast Cameron’s bright, youthful demeanour served
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Waiting for Godot Theatre Royal Haymarket Monsters Arcola Godot is one of the most undramatic pieces of theatre ever written and it contains a conundrum I’ve never seen satisfactorily resolved. As a playwright you aim to communicate emotion. If you can make the spectators feel what the characters are feeling, you have a success. However,
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The Last Cigarette Trafalgar Studio Rookery Nook Menier Simon Gray’s twilight diaries may well be a prose masterpiece. That the stage adaptation hasn’t done them justice is a fact few want to admit. The ‘much-loved’ fallacy has descended over this production for understandable reasons. Gray was a darling of the theatre, and the cast —
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Impressions, rather than substance, dominated today’s PMQs. With the Brown premiership downgraded from stable to critical over the weekend, this could have been a career-terminating ordeal for the soggy-eyed old panda but he got through it pretty well. By the end he was still confidently afloat, if not quite buoyant. Cameron raised the question of
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Lloyd Evans charts the death of political satire and looks to where comedy is heading next Live comedy ought to be extinct. For five years the internet has been waving an eviction order in its face, but despite the YouTube menace, and its threat of death-by-a-thousand-clips, live stand-up is blossoming. You’ll have noticed this if
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A total cheat at PMQs today. It was a swine flu swindle. Only a week has passed since Labour’s manifesto-busting tax-hikes were announced in Darling’s bankruptcy budget and the MPs’ expenses scandal is still pumping out clouds of noxious smoke and yet Cameron allowed himself to be persuaded that the pig-bug business equals a State of Emergency.
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Wall Royal Court Alphabetical Order Hampstead David Hare, that marvellously sophisticated, dazzlingly eloquent and faintly ridiculous left-wing brahmin, has written a sequel to Via Dolorosa, his absorbing meditation on the woes of Israel. After the blithering drivel of Seven Jewish Children, Caryl Churchill’s impenetrably tedious response to Israel’s incursion into Gaza, the Royal Court has
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Calendar Girls Noël Coward Only When I Laugh Arcola Ooh dear, the critics have been terribly sniffy about Calendar Girls. This dazzlingly funny, shamelessly sentimental and utterly captivating tale of middle-aged women posing naked to raise cash for charity should have won five-star plaudits all round. But the reviews have thrown a veil over its
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The highlight of the Budget began the moment Alistair Darling sat down. David Cameron’s brief, savage and brilliantly detailed attack on Labour’s ‘decade of debt’ must rate as his best ever parliamentary performance. At 12:30 the Chancellor stood up and delivered his budget in the studious, methodical manner of a vicar running through the accounts
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Lloyd Evans wanders round Inner Temple and discovers another world in the tangle of squares Where’s the best place to eat lunch in London? First let’s strike restaurants off the list. At a restaurant your plate of recently throttled livestock will have been executed by a pimply sadist, cooked by a cursing psychopath and delivered
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Maggie’s End Shaw Death and the King’s Horseman Olivier Here’s an unexpected treat. An angry left-wing play crammed with excellent jokes. Ed Waugh and Trevor Wood’s lively bad-taste satire starts with Margaret Thatcher’s death. A populist New Labour Prime Minister rashly opts to grant her a state funeral which prompts a furious reaction in Labour’s