Theatre

The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk begins with a phone conversation between a pretentious art critic and a man called Marc. This turns out to be Marc Chagall, the expressionist painter, who was born in Vitebsk in Belarus in 1887. It would have been helpful to include his name in the title. Emma Rice, the director, relies on her usual blend of dances, songs and pretty lighting to tell her tale. She has very low expectations of her audience. The sad characters cry. The happy characters laugh. The amorous characters dance rapturously. Everyone sings a lot. The script consists mainly of plot points written in clunky, airless prose. ‘It was the

Blackeyed Theatre is another victim of the virus. Its production of Jane Eyre was midway through a UK tour, and due to visit China for a month, when the pandemic shot its plans to bits. Last month the show was revived on stage and committed to film. Kelsey Short (Jane) leads a team of just five actors who tell the story as Charlotte Brontë wrote it. The costumes, hairstyles and habits of speech seem authentically Victorian. The director, Adrian McDougall, has rejected the fashionable habit of presenting Jane as a rad-fem freedom fighter surrounded by grotesque male oppressors. His version reminds us how sympathetic the novel is towards men. Mr

Sasha is angry. He’s a gay artist on his way to his niece’s birthday party and he keeps popping codeine pills to get him through the dull ceremony ahead. His devoted boyfriend, Chet, hasn’t realised that Sasha’s drug habit is a full-blown addiction but Sasha is highly secretive. He shows us two sides of his nature at once. Outside, he’s a friendly smiling uncle who dutifully attends family celebrations. Inside he’s spitting with rage at his brother’s cosy life and its trite domestic rituals. When he greets his pregnant sister-in-law he grins politely while fuming to himself: ‘There’s a billion family photos here. If I spat anywhere I’d hit one.’

Emilia is a period piece about Emilia Bassano who may have been the ‘dark lady’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The writer, Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, declines to turn the subject into a history play and instead creates a larky sketch show with snippets of literary gossip. Our heroine enters as a frightened teenager contemplating the horrors of courtship: ‘Men sniff at me like dogs.’ Marriage, she shudders, will crush her, mind and body. ‘As I grow, I must shrink.’ She’s also a poet who needs a publisher but she’s thwarted by institutional sexism in the book trade. ‘Women’s poetry?’ screeches a male reader. ‘The most dangerous rubbish I’ve ever seen.’ At court,

Death of England: Delroy is a companion piece to Death of England, which ran in February at the NT and examined the white working classes. Here the focus is on a successful black Briton, Delroy, who votes Tory and feels at home in multicultural society. The charismatic Michael Balogun plays him as a complex, shrewd and humane figure. He likes to mock white people who judge others according to superficialities like accent and pronunciation. And he recalls his horrified excitement when a white girl at school calmly placed her finger inside his boxer shorts. Delroy has plenty of white pals including his girlfriend, Carly, who is expecting their child. The

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

Theatres can open if they want to. That’s the current position. The only factor keeping a playhouse dark is a lack of guts or imagination on the part of its leadership. A small pub in Vauxhall, The Eagle, is mounting new plays in its garden space to raise everyone’s morale. Punters must wear masks and sit in bubbles. ‘We’re adhering to the government guidelines,’ announced the artistic director before the start, ‘which are changing all the time.’ The show is a feelgood musical about drifters and dreamers in their twenties trying to make it in New York. Waverley wants to be an actress but her plans are blown off course

In Bad Taste is a slapstick comedy about five female terrorists who murder the governor of the Bank of England. They chop him to pieces, cook him in a casserole and devour the lot. Their plan is to ‘eat the rich’, literally, and to trigger a worldwide revolution. After this grimly hilarious opening the script takes a sharp U-turn when one of the women makes a speech denouncing misogynists. The others agree to drop the revolt against the wealthy and to hunt down nasty men instead. Each woman suggests a candidate for execution: a male colleague who works too sluggishly, a father-in-law who makes judgmental comments, a drunkard who gropes

Southwark Playhouse has revived an American show, The Last Five Years, whose run was cancelled in March. In advance, I received an email outlining the theatre’s new rules, which appeared to exceed the minimum legal requirements. At the venue, I found that the main entrance had become the exit while the side door had become the main entrance. What for? Perhaps an unsubtle reminder that ‘everything’s changed now, pal, so get used to it’. The queue on the pavement moved at a turtle’s pace because the usher gave each playgoer a homily about the new regime before allowing them to pass through Checkpoint Charlie. Inside it was like an army

Curious thing, writer’s block. If you believe it exists. Terry Pratchett didn’t. ‘There’s no such thing,’ he said. ‘It was invented by people in California who couldn’t write.’ He had a point. Writers write, period. But there is a syndrome in my house known as Not Starting Anything New Through Fear Of It Being Not Very Good. Less catchy than ‘writer’s block’, but arguably a more accurate description of the condition. My Covid-induced version of the above involved endlessly ‘honing’ an already completed play about my mother to devastatingly little effect and musing on the oldest creative question of all: is there a formula for writing success, and if so

The season of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads continues at the Bridge. In The Hand of God we meet Celia, a posh antiques dealer, who befriends old maids in the hope of acquiring their valuables cheaply. Like everyone in her trade she uses play-acting and mind games to give her the advantage while haggling. If her enemy falters, she pounces. A man visits her shop and becomes visibly excited by a framed drawing which Celia hoped to flog for £30. Spotting his eagerness, she trebles the price. He pays up and hurries out. Later she learns that the drawing was by an old master whose style she failed to recognise. Millions

Collectors of TV titles that sound as if they were thought of by Alan Partridge will presumably have spotted Danny Dyer on Harold Pinter. As Dyer himself understatedly put it: ‘This might seem an unlikely pairing: the likely lad and the Nobel Prize winner.’ Yet, what made the programme such an intriguing if undeniably peculiar watch is that the pairing in question wasn’t dreamed up by a desperate (or drunk) commissioning editor. In 2000, aged 22, Dyer auditioned for Pinter’s Celebration at the Almeida Theatre in Islington. ‘I knew the money would be rubbish,’ he told us, ‘so I didn’t care much.’ Nor, unlike his rivals, did he really know who

It has roughly the same proportions as Shakespeare’s Globe. The Roman Theatre in Verulamium (St Albans) is an atmospheric ruin with low flint walls, a banked rampart and a single stone column. Historians estimate that the circular space, measuring about 40 yards in diameter, would have enabled 7,000 spectators to watch plays, gladiatorial contests and executions. That figure seems too high. A capacity of 1,500 might be nearer the mark. These days the venue hosts outdoor theatre. Playgoers who sit at the edge of the auditorium can reach out and touch the ancient flint walls and run their fingers across the grain of the Roman concrete. During the August cold

For nearly six months our subsidised playhouses, notably the National Theatre, have been dark. What have we missed? Not much. Some would say nothing at all. And this has come as a surprise to those of us who were led to believe that the subsidised theatre is critical to ‘the national conversation’. It turns out that the nation can happily debate political and social issues without the help of playwrights or actors. Perhaps it’s time to re-examine our state-funded theatres and the reasons we support them. The National Theatre was set up in 1963, soon after the establishment of the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1961, and both received funding from