Theatre

Summer and Smoke by Tennessee Williams dates from the late 1940s. He hadn’t quite reached the peaks of sentimental delicacy he found in his golden period but he was getting there. As a lesser-known curiosity, the script deserves a production that explains itself openly and plainly. Rebecca Frecknall has directed a beautiful and sometimes bizarre-looking show which is beset by ‘great ideas’. What a great idea to encircle the stage with upright pianos that the actors can cavort on, and whose exposed innards can twinkle with atmospheric lights at poignant moments. The pianos are an ingenious and handsome solo effort but they serve the designer’s ends and not the play’s.

The Best Man by Gore Vidal is set during a fictional American election in 1960. Two gifted candidates seek their party’s nomination. Secretary Russell is a chilly but experienced political hack whose marriage is a sham. Senator Cantwell, a more attractive character, is an impulsive charmer married to a blonde bombshell who adores him. The show feels dated but the acting, the costumes and the set designs capture the period nicely. The plot is perhaps short of pace and density. Each character has an embarrassing secret to hide. Secretary Russell suffered a mental breakdown a few years ago. Senator Cantwell enjoyed a bisexual fling in the army. The action turns

He looks like an absent-minded watchmaker, or a homeless chess champion, or a stray physics genius trying to find his way to the Nobel Prize ceremony. He’s in his early sixties, tall and stooping, a bit thin on top, wearing a greatcoat and a crumpled polo-neck jumper. A blur of whiskers obscures the line of his jaw. He has a bulbous, Larkinesque skull and battleship-grey teeth; and if you wanted to cast someone as Spooner, the literary vagrant in Pinter’s No Man’s Land, you’d struggle to find a closer match. This is Michael Boyd, former director of the RSC, who was knighted in 2012 for services to drama. We meet

Frozen starts with a shrink having a panic attack. She hyperventilates into her hand-bag and then gets drunk on an aeroplane where she yells out, ‘We’re all going to die.’ She’s a bit loopy, clearly, which is how lazy playwrights make psychologists interesting. The shrink’s task is to examine Ralph, a serial murderer of children, and to deliver a lecture on the cause of his malignity. We hear bits from the lecture, bits of confession from Ralph, and weepy bits from the mother of one of Ralph’s victims. The subject is punishingly gruesome but its dramatic power is non-existent because the writer Bryony Lavery hasn’t learned how to stimulate the

Audio description, or AD, as it is fondly called, is coming of age. Once consigned to the utility room of grey voices reading boring cues to inform blind people what was going on on stage or screen, AD is now a dynamic narrative form that is findinga presence in almost all the arts (from opera, theatre and film to art galleries and museums). It is so widespread and well done that many consider it an art form in itself. For the uninitiated, audio description simply provides a listener, through headphones or a TV speaker, with the essential details of the action and events in a film or play during a

‘Mad, wearying and inconsequential gabble,’ sighed the Financial Times in 1958. ‘One quails in slack-jawed dismay.’ Here’s the FT at the same play last month: ‘The best I have seen on-stage.’ How about the Evening Standard? Then: ‘Like trying to solve a crossword puzzle where every vertical clue is designed to put you off the horizontal.’ Now: ‘Pinter’s cruel dialogue has rarely sounded sharper.’ ‘What all this means only Mr Pinter knows,’ mused the Manchester Guardian. On its return to the West End, the playwright’s biographer Michael Billington, writing in the Guardian, judged that ‘The Birthday Party has lost none of its capacity to intrigue’. Sixty years ago at the

Nicholas Hytner’s new show is a modern-dress Julius Caesar, heavily cut and played in the round. It runs for two hours, no interval. The action opens with the audience grouped around a central stage where a ramshackle rock gig descends into a riot. The play unfolds like an illegal rave at a warehouse. It’s bold, in its way, and some of it works. A couple of the Roman senators are played by actresses and the text has been bodged to suit the cult of gender neutrality. ‘Romans’ is substituted for ‘men’ in Mark Antony’s famous line, ‘so are they all, all honourable men’. This small change is curiously painful to

The NT’s new production, John, is by a youngish American playwright, Annie Baker. We Brits tend to assume that ‘john’ is American for ‘toilet’ so perhaps lavatorial treats are in store. The setting is a provincial hotel run by a blithering old dear whose only guests are two grumbling yuppies with marriage problems. The plot of a play usually starts within ten minutes but not here: nothing happens. That’s the point. Instead of a story there’s a minor predicament and this, oddly enough, suits the show’s personalities. The yuppies, Elias and Jenny, are just about memorable enough to be human beings but they haven’t the substance or grit for dramatic

The Birthday Party is among Pinter’s earliest and strangest works. It deconstructs the conventions of a repertory thriller but doesn’t bother to reassemble them. The setting is a derelict seaside town on the south coast. Petey, a thick deckchair attendant, runs a guest-house with his ageing wife, Meg. She’s a zero-IQ cook whose signature dish is a slice of white toast charred in fat. They have one resident, Stanley, a former pianist whom Meg cossets and mothers like a substitute son. Enter two London thugs, Goldberg and McCann, who invite Stanley to a party as a pretext to punish him for unknown misdemeanours. The whisky-soaked celebrations involve a game of

A pattern emerges. A hot American playwright, dripping with prestigious awards, is honoured in London with a transfer of their best-known work. And it turns out to be all right. Not bad. Nothing special. The latest wunderkind to wow London is Amy Herzog (five plays performed, six awards received), whose marital bust-up drama Belleville is set in a glamorously derelict corner of Paris. Abby and Zack, both 28, are newlywed Americans trying to shore up the wreckage of their European gap year. Abby wanted to learn French but has stopped attending classes. Instead, she’s studying yoga although the lessons are regularly cancelled. And her acting career seems to have stalled.

The Twilight Zone, an American TV show from the early 1960s, reinvented the ghost story for the age of space exploration. Director Richard Jones has collaborated with Anne Washburn to turn several TV episodes into a single play. Eight episodes in all. Way too many. The structure is designed to bamboozle us from the start. Some of the storylines have been broken up and are placed episodically throughout the piece, while others are preserved as units and delivered whole. Even the most keen-eyed viewer gets flummoxed by this mystery. Among the storylines that baffled me were: a cop quizzes some stranded bus passengers to find out which is an alien;

A new play at the Bush with a catchy political title. Parliament Square introduces us to Kat, a young Scots mum, who abandons her baby girl and her devoted husband and commutes to London to kill herself. She doesn’t want to die but shrill voices in her head are urging her to turn her body into a human fireball on College Green, opposite parliament. Her political cause is unclear. Her personal hopes are plainly set out: death and posthumous fame. Everything is ready. Kat douses herself in unleaded petrol (it’s not a carbon-neutral protest), and as the flames engulf her flesh she emits a blood-curdler from her solar plexus. ‘The

Maximum Victoriana at the Old Vic for Matthew Warchus’s A Christmas Carol. Even before we reach our seats we’re accosted by bonneted wenches handing out mince pies. Merchants in top hats roam the aisles proffering satsumas, which they call, with accurate Victorian incorrectness, ‘oranges’. The guts of the theatre have been ripped out for this show. A slender catwalk stretches 40 yards from the rear of the stage to the farthest wall of the auditorium, with the seats gathered around this runway in odd little clumps. The narrow performing area leaves no room for scenery, so Dickens’s London is suggested by dozens of oblong lanterns dangling overhead, like mini-Tardises, all