Pete suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

Take two couples

Lloyd Evans

Wednesday, 9th July 2008

On the Rocks
Hampstead

In My Name
Trafalgar Studios

All Nudity Shall Be Punished
Union

There are numerous perils with staging this sort of material — parody, irrelevance, pretentiousness and absurdity — but Rosenthal avoids all such traps. Just about. Tracy-Ann Oberman manages to make the silly, big-bosomed, cake-scoffing Frieda both believable and likeable. And Ed Stoppard confidently enlists our sympathies. It’s a great help that D.H. Lawrence belongs to that small group of notorieties (the others are Lenin, Jesus and Santa Claus) whom any man can be made up to look like. With his neat dark beard and haunted face he stomps about the cottage mesmerising both households with his intellectual games, crackpot schemes and snatches of rhapsodic philosophy. What a strange mixture he was. Bully, sex maniac, Leveller, poet, polemicist, horticulturalist and revolutionary. Had he lived now he might have become a messianic cult leader. The play is richly textured and works as biography, as an examination of the creative spirit and as a snapshot of England during the first world war. It’s also a sermon on the perils of marrying authors and, above all, a very funny neighbours-from-hell sitcom. If you found yourself on holiday with these posturing hysterics you’d be on your way home after exactly two and a half hours. The length of the play. Nicely judged.

In My Name has just transferred to a West End studio theatre after a sell-out run at the Old Red Lion. It’s set in the immediate aftermath of the 2005 Tube bombings and the whole of London is quivering with untethered anxieties. We’re in a squalid bedsit where shelf-stacker Grim is trying to get to know his sinister new flatmate, Egg. Enter Royal an amiable free wheeler and the place suddenly bristles with competitive male loyalties. Grim suggests they watch Friends. Egg isn’t keen. ‘Should be called C***s. The comedy is nervy, nasty and truthful. Things get worse when Egg starts to show signs of paranoia. They order a takeaway and Egg kidnaps the delivery man accusing him of being an assassin. What began as an unsettling underclass comedy develops into a brutal psychological thriller. Compelling and tightly focused as it is, the play falls short in some areas. At times it’s not clear how the action relates to the events unfolding outside and in the flat upstairs. But the performances are top-notch. Kevin Watt is horribly convincing as a damaged nutcase unable to break free from his past. And Ray Panthaki, playing a needy, likeable drifter, has vast stores of charm and a natural comic grace.

At the Union there’s a Brazilian play with a great title: All Nudity Shall Be Punished. Little known over here, Nelson Rodrigues (1912–80) is one of Brazil’s most celebrated playwrights. This torrid, complex play is directed on a tiny budget by Kwong Loke using a cast of Brits and Brazilians speaking English with a variety of accents. This harms the unity of the piece. Rodrigues is certainly an interesting writer. He just needs more money thrown at him.