Lloyd Evans is The Spectator's sketch-writer and theatre critic
It was preposterous. A prime minister at the head of a party that’s been running the country for 13 years posed as a revolutionary today. Rishi Sunak presented himself to the Tory conference as a dashing anarchist, an upstart rebel, a fearless saviour who wants to wrest power from an authoritarian clique and hand it
It sounds like a barking-mad student sketch but the final product is marinated in wisdom and maturity. It’s Headed Straight Towards Us is a mellow riot of a play. The setting is a rocky glacier in Iceland during the filming of a corny sci-fi movie. Hugh (Sam West) is a cerebral thesp who specialises in
Partygate has morphed from a half-forgotten scandal into a new drama-documentary which airs on Channel 4 tomorrow night. This rehash of old news depicts Boris Johnson as an amiable tyrant, played by Jon Culshaw, who presides over a gang of chaotic law-breakers as they hold riotous parties in Downing Street at the height of lockdown.
20 min listen
This week Freddy Gray takes a trip to Planet Biden and imagines what would happen if little green men invaded earth and found a big orange one back in the White House (01:15), Kate Andrews finds herself appalled by the so-called ‘advice’ routinely handed out to women that can be at best, judgemental, and at
42 min listen
On the podcast this week: Lord Sumption makes the case for leaving the ECHR in The Spectator’s cover piece. He says that the UK has strong courts and can pass judgement on human rights by itself and joins the podcast alongside Dr Joelle Grogan – legal academic and head of research at UK in a Changing Europe
Free grub, free booze and the chance to fall in love. That’s the deal offered by Blind Date, a matchmaking strand in the Guardian that brings together lonely hearts and asks them to spill the beans. When I applied for this enticing freebie I had no expectation of being chosen, but my email was answered
The playwright Sam Holcroft likes to toy with dramatic conventions and to tease her audiences by withholding key information about the characters. This tinkering seems to scare the critics into praising her scripts even though they feel like clumsily written thrillers or botched sci-fi yarns where the rules keep changing. Her technique appeals to high-minded
It has now officially all gone wrong for stand-up’s sex god. Ahead of Saturday night’s Channel 4 documentary about Russell Brand, and the newspaper disclosures in the Sunday Times, there was speculation that the witnesses could be opportunistic attention-seekers. The account of the first complainant appears to undermine that idea. On the same day as
Podcast mania continues at Westminster. Discarded grandees from all parties have noticed the success of The Rest is Politics, the hit podcast by Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell, which has now become a lucrative roadshow. The two gasbags sold out the Albert Hall in a matter of minutes, and their popularity has drawn new players
An odd affair, PMQs. Few blows were landed, no blood was spilled. The party leaders tussled over a handful of fifth-order issues. Sir Keir Starmer suggested that the escaped terror suspect Daniel Khalife should have been held as a Category A prisoner. Rishi Sunak scolded the great barrister for not knowing that unconvicted suspects are
Anthropology is a drama about artificial intelligence that starts as an ultra-gloomy soap opera. A suicidal lesbian, Merril, speaks on the phone to her kid sister, Angie, and they discuss Merril’s beautiful ex-girlfriend. After ten minutes, we learn that Angie’s voice belongs to a robot, Digital Angie, created by Merril to replicate the real Angie
Crumbling concrete dominated PMQs. Sir Keir climbed to his feet and announced in sepulchral tones that most of Britain’s schools are likely to be flattened by the first stiff breeze of autumn. He gave an example, from May 2018, of a primary school that suddenly imploded ‘over the weekend, and thankfully no children were injured’.
Macbeth at the Globe wants to put us at our ease and make us feel comfortable with the play’s arcane world of ghouls, hallucinations and murderous prophecies. Abigail Graham’s up-to-the-minute production offers a few nods to history, like the eagle masks worn by the three witches, but for some reason they speak in dense cockney
Bleach and germs are the central themes of Dr Semmelweis, written by Mark Rylance and Stephen Brown. The opening scene, set in the 1860s, presents the harmless old doctor as a charming oddball who adores playing chess with his happy, clever wife. This is code: Semmelweis is an intellectual and a feminist whom it’s safe
Lucy Prebble belongs to the posse of scribblers responsible for the HBO hit, Succession. Perhaps in honour of this distinction, her 2012 play, The Effect, has been revived at the National by master-director Jamie Lloyd. The show is a sitcom set in Britain’s most dysfunctional drug-testing facility where two sexy young volunteers, Tristan and Connie,
The Mitfords is a superb one-woman show by Emma Wilkinson Wright who focuses her attention on Unity, Diana and Jessica. In the early 1930s, Unity became Hitler’s lover and she lived in a luxurious Munich apartment confiscated from a wealthy Jewish family. The Führer, whom she nicknamed ‘Wolfie’, gave her the pearl-handled revolver with which
Even in her absence, Nicola Sturgeon dominated Iain Dale’s discussion with Alex Salmond and David Davis at the Edinburgh festival. Dale invited them both to comment on George Galloway’s suggestion that Sturgeon is ‘Mrs Thatcher in a kilt.’ Salmond flatly rejected this caricature. (Evidently he knows that criticising her in public will do him no
A chilly August in Edinburgh. Colder than it’s been for 20 years and the city looks scruffier than ever. Locked Portakabins squat in elegant stone courtyards. Unused site machinery lies abandoned outside neoclassical museums. Pavements and bridges are scarred by ugly steel roadblocks, and lurid street signs mar the visual harmony of virtually every thoroughfare.
Mick Lynch, the general secretary of the RMT, has never felt truly English. In conversation with Iain Dale at the Edinburgh festival, he reveals that his parents moved here from Ireland during the war and settled in the Ladbroke Grove area of London where they raised him and his four siblings. His father was ‘an
The Royal Court’s new topical satire, Word-Play, opens with a gaffe-prone Tory prime minister giving a TV interview in which he commends Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. The Downing Street press team suffer a meltdown as they struggle to draft an apology or a retraction. Opposition parties try to profit from the blunder and
