Lloyd Evans

Yard Gal Oval House Lucky Seven Hampstead Last week I saw a little-known play, Yard Gal, which I’m pretty sure is a classic. Written ten years ago by Rebecca Prichard and revived with scintillating and furious energy by Stef O’Driscoll, the play follows the lives of two drug–whore teenagers, Boo and Marie, living in the badlands of Hackney. The girls exist in a boozed-up whirl of crappy nightclubs, tainted coke and rough sex with strangers. An early scene gives the flavour. Marie fellates a bent copper in a squad car and when he fails to pay up she exacts revenge with her teeth. ‘Smallest meal I ever ate.’ The plot is slender. Boo falls out with a rival gang member, there’s a bust-up, a stabbing and a prison conviction. All fairly predictable.

To Be Straight With You Lyttelton American Briefs Above the Stag, 15 Bressenden Place, SW1 It’s been said that the Catholic Church has always known how to deal with extremists. It also knows — or used to know — how to deal with homosexuals. Monasteries populated by ‘celibate’ bachelors, nunneries teeming with wimpled lesbians, these were the discreetly sanctioned gay playgrounds which gave the Church licence to exploit a talent pool it would have lost had it rigorously pursued the technical prohibition against homosexuality. In fact, the Old Testament God isn’t a particularly virulent homophobe. Cattle-rustlers and liars are mentioned in the Ten Commandments. Gays aren’t.

Oedipus Olivier La Clique Hippodrome Here it is. The National’s autumn blockbuster, Oedipus. Of all the plays of classical antiquity this is the best, the most accessible, the least tedious, and Jonathan Kent’s impressive production allows the beautiful and awful symmetry of the storyline to work its magic. Yet Kent and his designer Paul Brown aren’t quite immune to the tempting follies of conceptualism. The set has big ideas. It’s a convex platform,  a sort of upside-down wok, with a steep gradient which makes the actors stand at a tilt, like Charlie Brown and chums on their pitcher’s mound. And it revolves with painful and inexorable slowness, completing a full cycle during the course of the play. One can imagine the peals of ‘genius!

Ivanov Wyndham’s Theatre Now or Later Royal Court Rain Man Apollo Great directors have the power to alter taste. Michael Grandage’s avowed aim with this revival of Ivanov, which opens the Donmar’s year-long residency at the Wyndham’s, is to secure the play a permanent place in the repertory. But even a director as sure-footed as Grandage can’t overcome the script’s shortcomings. Dashed off in ten days by a 27-year-old Chekhov, it feels glib and careless, its imitative homages to Hamlet creaky and self-conscious. Ivanov is a country landowner, his debts climbing, his marriage sinking, infatuated with a neighbour’s young daughter and with a peculiar taste for philosophical ramblings.

Joan Rivers: A Work in Progress by a Life in Progress Leicester Square Theatre Liberty Globe Sons of York Finborough Let’s hear it for those ageing babes and their one-gran shows. Hip, hip, hip-replacement. Britt Ekland and Elaine Stritch are already at it, and here comes Joan Rivers who wastes no time wasting the opposition. ‘Anyone see Elaine Stritch? Wonderful show wasn’t it? Mind you, it was all me, me, me, me, me, me. “I understudied Ethel Merman. And I drank. I worked with Noel Coward. And I drank. I tried to seduce Rock Hudson. And he drank.”’ At 75, Rivers is easy on the eye, like a well-set egg custard in a wig.

Gone Too Far! Hackney Empire Eating Ice Cream on Gaza Beach Soho Piaf Donmar Anyone for a knife crime comedy? Bola Agbaje’s attempt to get laughs from our anxieties about blade-wielding teenagers might have been a disaster if the script hadn’t been so witty and its examination of the subdivisions within black culture so penetrating. The play starts out, rather improbably, with a Nigerian boy Ikudayesi arriving to spend time with his brother Yemi who has been brought up in Britain. Yemi has always posed as a fashionable Caribbean and suppressed his west African lineage from a misplaced sense of shame. As a mixed-race kid puts it, ‘The Africans sold us to the white man and stayed behind living like kings and queens in their palaces.