Lloyd Evans

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 a pastoral operetta with lots of songs and larky rhetoric and a silly happy ending. The play’s central character, Leontes, is a sexual paranoid who accuses his best friend of adultery, slings his pregnant wife in jail and sends their newborn baby into exile. Later he finds out he was mistaken. They’re all innocent. Contrition breaks over him. But just as his jealousy was unconvincing so his remorse is unaffecting.

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 provincial bourgeoisie to parliament. Odd choice. Putting the play at the heart of the British Empire adds not one ounce of dramatic weight, and if Thomas is a leading democratic statesman his unworldly Puritanism seems bizarre and incredible. The good news is that Harris has helped her co-author discover a knack for comedy he never showed as a solo writer. Numerous ribald Ibsenities have been restored to the script.

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 head he knows he’s just one of billions of forgettable cameos. Celebrity and therapy resolve this conundrum. Therapy lets you believe your little world, and its problems are as significant as the rest of humanity. Celebrity forces the same belief.

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 — Felicity Kendal, Jasper Britton, Nicholas Le Prevost — are twinkly-eyed favourites from the national treasure trove. But even buckletloads of affection can’t disguise the mismatch between a meandering first-person narrative and the focused concision of the stage. Gray, a talented playwright, sidestepped the theatre and chose good old prose for his last testament. Strong hint there, I’d say.

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 you read newspaper adverts. Eighteen months ago they were full of barmy invitations to take out a loan for 10 times the value of your house, or to ‘buy’ (that is rent in advance for 99 years) a room in a boutique hotel in Prague or a glass-box-with-a-view in Abu Dhabi. These schemes have been replaced with full-page ads promoting comedians on nationwide tours. The scale is vast.

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 brilliance. Why? Well, we critics dislike these schmaltzy populist confections because they deprive us of the chance to flex our intellect in public and serve up a perspicacious and polysyllabic exegesis. Ironically, though, my colleagues have not only shortchanged the show they’ve also missed the opportunity to do their brainy show-off bit — like this. The themes of Calendar Girls are rooted in ancient, universal myth.

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 to your table by a grudging PhD drop-out angling for a tip. So forget restaurants. Instead, choose outdoor refreshment and a bill of fare invented by the Romans and suitable for any time of day. A hunk of bread, a wedge of cheese and a flagon of Valpolicella. And for a picnicking spot you couldn’t do better than the lush shelving lawn of Inner Temple just off the Strand.

Parlour Song Almeida Tusk Tusk Royal Court Back in 1995 Jez Butterworth got tagged with the ‘Most Promising Playwright’ beeper and he still hasn’t shaken it off. Butterworth is an excellent second-rate writer, he has a wonderful knack for quirky comic dialogue but he wants to be a Great Artist too. A pity. All a playwright should aim to be is an entertainer. Butterworth’s new play, Parlour Song, is set in an estate full of suburban semis and it opens with two male pals joshing aggressively in a sitting-room. Andrew Lincoln’s sleek young Dale runs a car-wash business and complains of ‘pruney fingers’. Toby Jones’s squat, balding Ned works in demolition and wields Zeus-like powers of life and death over huge industrial buildings.