The Beeb could turn this script into TV gold: Howerd’s End reviewed

It’s touch and go whether the theatre will survive this latest assault. Some venues have pushed back their entire programme by four weeks, which is chaotic but manageable. Theatres mounting a panto are in a trickier position because they can’t trust Gove and Johnson not to extend the curfew into the festive season. November is the month when companies start to book venues for the Brighton Festival in May. What to do? Take the plunge or wait it out for another year? And the big decision about Edinburgh 2021 will have to be faced before the winter is over. The lockdown in spring was a financial and professional calamity but this new onslaught adds a spiritual element — despair. What’s the point of pursuing an art form which the government is ready to sacrifice in order to tackle a bug whose recovery rate is extraordinarily high? At least the plagues that closed the Elizabethan theatres had the courtesy to kill huge numbers. Covid is a pinprick by comparison and yet our rulers are using this tiny aperture to administer deadly poisons. In future, the theatre may evolve into a decorative greenfield pursuit, like lawn bowls or cricket, staged outdoors in the summer months only.

A new venue, the Golden Goose, has opened with a biographical comedy, Howerd’s End by Mark Farrelly. Up go the lights and we see a half-blind man of 80 seated in a wheelchair beside a portrait of Frankie Howerd. This is Dennis Heymer, Howerd’s partner and manager for four decades, and he looks back at his life with the troubled comedian. They met in 1955 at the Dorchester where Heymer worked as a sommelier. ‘Do you bowl from the pavilion end?’ asked Howerd, using the gay code of the time. The show moves deftly between his private and professional lives.