Darwin revisited

Oh, not again. Yup, I’m afraid so. I had no wish to return to the vexed topic of Darwinism but a much-praised show in east London tempted me out on a frosty night to the Arcola theatre.

Bryony Lavery’s new play has a storyline that’s as nutty as a Christmas cake in Broadmoor.

Molly, an archaeologist working in Africa, smuggles the skeleton of a female hominid back to her home in the Yorkshire Dales. The unearthed Neanderthal springs to life and Molly proceeds to school her in the amazing truths of evolution. The characters in this bizarre educational...

Continue reading...

Email to a friend  |   Permalink   |   Comments (0)

Sharp as an arrow

Four couples but only three available bedrooms is the brilliant stratagem devised by Alan Ayckbourn for his 1975 relationship comedy Bedroom Farce. It’s being revived at the Rose Theatre in Kingston in repertory with a rather different take on coupled life, Strindberg’s Miss Julie, for an aptly named season, ‘Behind Closed Doors’. The three separate bedrooms fill up the unusually wide lozenge-shaped stage of the new Rose (modelled on the Elizabethan original) as our four couples writhe and wrangle under the spotlight of Ayckbourn’s all-seeing, all-knowing wit.

Ernest and Delia who occupy the pink satin boudoir with en-suite bathroom...

Continue reading...

Email to a friend  |   Permalink   |   Comments (0)

Street culture

What Fatima Did... is billed as a play. Really, it’s a fugue, a variation on a theme, a crude and boisterous tone poem. The plot is deliberately small-scale. A gang of fun-loving inner-city sixth-formers are shocked to learn that one of their pals, Fatima, has forsaken Western values and adopted the nijab. Her boyfriend George is hit hardest by her betrayal, and he retaliates by showing up at a costume party dressed as a medieval crusader. This gesture doesn’t quite work now that the flag of St George has been reinvented as a multicultural symbol. To freak Fatima out properly...

Continue reading...

Email to a friend  |   Permalink   |   Comments (0)

No laughing matter

They gushed, they cheered, they purred, they sighed. When a young Richard Eyre read Trevor Griffiths’s new play Comedians in 1975 he prounounced it ‘great’ on the spot. ‘Trev,’ said Rich, ‘you’re knocking on Chekhov’s door.’ Eyre’s production was picked up by an equally thrilled Peter Hall who transferred it to the National and from there it leapfrogged to Broadway. The director of this star-studded revival, Sean Holmes, read the play at 17 and he, too, was smitten. But were the crimson crushes of youth really justified?

Comedians is set in a Manchester evening class where six stand-up comics...

Continue reading...

Email to a friend  |   Permalink   |   Comments (0)

Crash, bang, wallop

Here comes Hare. And he’s got the answer to the credit crunch. His energetic, well-researched and richly informative new work opens with an actor playing the writer himself (curious frown, Hush Puppies) as he sets out to discover why the markets jumped off a ledge last autumn. The result is less a play and more a commission of inquiry. Over many a lingering lunch Hare has leaned his inquisitive ear towards senior bankers, top journalists and leading economists. He then distilled their testimony into this fact-crammed pageant. The City’s major players saunter across the Lyttelton stage, their silk-lined suits softly...

Continue reading...

Email to a friend  |   Permalink   |   Comments (0)

Gasping for entertainment

‘What do you want?’ a film producer asks Holly Golightly about half an hour into Breakfast at Tiffany’s. ‘I don’t know,’ she says, ‘but if I find out I’ll tell you first.’ At this point my hopes for the evening collapsed. Rule one of the characterisation manual states that a character who wants nothing, or nothing much, isn’t a dramatic personality but a list of utterances enfolding an emptiness.

In this adaptation of Truman Capote’s wartime novella, Holly comes across as a camp fantasy, a popsicle of pretentious egoism floating around New York being adored by wealthy fools, fantasising about...

Continue reading...

Email to a friend  |   Permalink   |   Comments (0)