Culture

Arts Council England takes money from almost all of us and spends it on culture for almost none of us. Among its clique of favoured writers is Ella Hickson whose work has twice been staged at the subsidised Almeida. Her first effort was a historical sketch show about oil-drilling, the second looked at the problem

The opening of Jonathan Maitland’s new play about Boris purports to be based on real events. Just before the referendum, the Tory maverick invited some chums over to help him decide whether to opt for Leave or Remain. Mrs Johnson was present along with Michael and Sarah Gove and the Evening Standard’s owner, Evgeny Lebedev.

Colour-blind casting is a denial of history. The Young Vic’s all-black version of Death of a Salesman asks us to believe that an ordinary African-American chap living in Brooklyn in 1928 might have owned a Chevrolet, and that a black businessman in the 1940s would consider asking a friend for ten grand to purchase a

Small Island, based on Andrea Levy’s novel about Jamaican migrants in Britain, feels like the world’s longest book review. We meet Hortense, a priggish school teacher, and her cool, handsome boyfriend who survive on a pittance in the Caribbean. Then we skip back to Hortense’s childhood in a house dominated by a bullying preacher who

It starts on a beautiful summer’s morning in the suburbs of America. A prosperous middle-aged dad is chatting with his neighbours in the garden of his comfortable home, but by nightfall his family has been destroyed. This is one of the most momentous convulsions in all drama. Arthur Miller’s masterful plotting, which he never again

It starts at a secretarial college. The stage is occupied by a dignified elderly lady who recalls her pleasure at learning shorthand in the 1920s. She lived in Germany and she took a job at a firm headed by a man named Goldberg. He was Jewish. These unremarkable disclosures are spoken by Brunhilde Pomsel, a

Nigel Slater is popular because he’s an exceptionally meek cook. Not for him the sprawling restaurant empire or the transatlantic TV career to excite envy and loathing. He writes about his trade in simple vivid prose and his bestselling memoir, Toast, has become a play. Young Nigel enters as a 1960s schoolboy, with shorts and

Caryl Churchill’s best-known play, Top Girls, owes a large debt to 1970s TV comedy. It opens with a Pythonesque dinner party in which noted female figures from myth and history get drunk while swapping gags and stories. We meet a Victorian explorer, an emperor’s concubine, a 16th-century Flemish battle-axe and a long-suffering Italian peasant girl.

The Phlebotomist by Ella Road explores the future of genetics. Suppose a simple blood test were able to tell us how long we will live and what disease will kill us. If the tests were compulsory and the results publicly available, a new hierarchy based on life expectancy would emerge. Citizens facing chronic illness or

Bruce Norris is a firefighter among dramatists. He runs towards danger while others sprint in the other direction. His Pulitzer-winning hit Clybourne Park studied ethnic bigotry among American yuppies and it culminated in a gruesomely funny scene in which smug liberals exchange racist jokes in public. The play was morally complex, dramatically satisfying and an

No menace, no Venice. This new production of Pinter’s Betrayal is set on a bare stage with scant regard for the play’s physical requirements. The script specifies a handful of furnished locations: a pub, a study, a flat, a hotel bedroom, a living room. But instead we get an off-white void where three youngish actors

Nicholas Hytner’s new show, Alys, Always, is based on a Harriet Lane novel that carries a strong echo of Brideshead. A well-educated journalist, Frances, becomes entangled with the wealthy Kyte family (the closeness to ‘Flyte’ is doubtless intentional), and she befriends the silly daughter, Polly, before setting her sights on the enigmatic father, Laurence, a

Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train by Stephen Adly Guirgis deserves its classic status. This wordy and highly cerebral play pulls off an extraordinary feat by leading the spectator inside the mind of a psychopath. The setting is Rikers Island, where an old lag, Lucius, befriends a younger detainee, Angel, who hopes to be acquitted of

When reviewers call a work ‘important’ they mean ‘boring’ and ‘earnest’. And in those terms Shipwreck is one of the most ‘important’ shows I’ve ever seen. It’s not a play but a series of monologues and conversations spoken by a group of American liberals stuck overnight in a rural farmhouse. ‘It’s a red zone,’ they

All About Eve is Cinderella steeped in acid rather than sugar. Eve, or Cinders, is a wannabe star who uses a powerful theatre critic (the Buttons character) to help her win fame by overcoming two Ugly Sisters represented by a movie goddess, Margo Channing, and her film-director boyfriend. This fairytale was filmed in 1950 with

The Dumb Waiter is a one-act play from 1957 that retains an extraordinary hold over the minds of theatre-goers. It’s set in the basement of a Birmingham restaurant where two Cockney hitmen are preparing to execute an unknown victim. A dumb waiter, or shelf on pulleys, descends from above containing requests for two-course meals. Liver

Hampstead has become quite a hit-factory since Ed Hall took over. His foreign policy is admirably simple. He scours New York for popular shows and spirits them over to London. His latest effort, Cost of Living, has attracted the film-star talent of Adrian Lester, who plays Eddie, a loquacious white trucker from Utah. (His ethnicity

The NT’s new play is an update of Pamela, a sexploitation novel by Samuel Richardson. It opens with Stephen Dillane and Cate Blanchett stranded in a concrete garage dressed as French maids. On one side, a black Audi saloon. Mid-stage, colourful blinking lights. At the edges, four other actors lurking. The main characters have no

The cast of Party Time includes John Simm, Celia Imrie, Ron Cook, Gary Kemp and other celebrities. They play a crew of posh thickos at a champagne party who chat away about private members’ clubs and adulterous affairs. In the background we hear of a ‘round-up’ involving the arrest and perhaps the murder of the

One masterpiece, one dud, and one interesting rediscovery. That’s Pinter Five. Victoria Station is a hilarious sketch which might have been turned into TV gold by the Pythons or the Two Ronnies. A radio controller needs a cabbie to collect a fare from Victoria Station, but the only driver available is a charming lunatic whose

Sweat, set in the Pennsylvanian rust belt, looks at a blue-collar community threatened by a factory closure. The script uses the flashback device. Scene One informs us that two lads were found guilty of doing a Bad Thing eight years ago. What Bad Thing? The author won’t tell us because the play needs suspense but

The Tell-Tale Heart is based on a teeny-weeny short story by Edgar Allan Poe. The full text appears in the programme notes. Here’s the gist. A madman kills his landlord and is haunted by a ghostly heartbeat that prompts him to confess his crime. Anthony Neilson’s adaptation turns both characters into women and gives away

Sam Shepard was perhaps the gloomiest playwright ever to spill his guts into a typewriter. The popularity of his work must owe itself to some deep grudge nursed by America’s elite against the redneck states. True West is a standard Shepard ordeal: a pair of damaged, inadequate, bitter, loveless white males are cudgelling each other

One of the biggest stars of the 1970s was the professional lard-bucket Mick McManus, who plied his trade as an all-in wrestler. The sport was televised to millions. The parents of the playwright Michael McManus must have calculated that by giving their child the same name as ‘The Dulwich Destroyer’ they would subtly galvanise his

I know nothing about Patricia Highsmith. The acclaimed American author wrote the kind of Sunday-night crime thrillers that put me to sleep. Her best-known creation, the suave psychopath Thomas Ripley, has spawned a number of films that I’ve carefully avoided. But ignorance is an ideal starting point for Switzerland, by Joanna Murray-Smith, a brilliantly nasty

Michelle Terry, chatelaine of the Globe, wants to put an end to penis-led Shakespeare by casting women in roles intended for men. To showcase her war on male cronyism she presents a version of Macbeth starring Paul Ready as the king. She plays the queen. In real life the two are married. This must be

Pinter Three appeals to opposite poles of the play-going spectrum. The birdbrains like me will enjoy the music-hall sketches while the goatee-strokers will have fun pretending that Pinter’s deadly earnest memory plays are worth seeing. Watching the first piece, Landscape, is like receiving a jigsaw puzzle in instalments. Two characters, Duff and Beth, speak to

Lauren Gunderson’s play I and You opens in the scruffy bedroom of 17-year-old Caroline. Lonely, beautiful and furious, she’s unable to participate in school life owing to a chronic liver problem. Into her hideaway barges Anthony, a handsome geek, who wants her to help with a Walt Whitman project. Caroline tries to chase him off

In the year since it opened, the Bridge has given us the following: a harmless Karl Marx comedy by Richard Bean; a modern-dress Julius Caesar with Ben Whishaw playing Brutus as a frowning existentialist; a dreary rustic soap opera written by newcomer Barney Norris; and an enjoyable NHS romp by Alan Bennett. Not quite the