Lloyd Evans is The Spectator's sketch-writer and theatre critic
Last week it was seven. This morning it stood at nine. By the end of PMQs it had climbed to 12. The statistic everyone is yawning about is the number of shimmies Ed Miliband has performed while failing to admit that he once vowed to ‘weaponise’ the NHS. The only source for Ed’s gangster talk,
A knockout show at the Young Vic. Literally. The stage has been reconfigured as a boxing ring to make Mike Bartlett’s play, Bull, feel like a sporting fixture. This is a common conceit, even a cliché, but here it’s done superbly. The auditorium floor is squash-club yellow and the stage is surrounded by a casual
Warning to publishers. Don’t commission a first-time author without giving him a deadline. The Chilcot Inquiry, a long-pondered probe into the origins of the Iraq war, is maturing gracefully and expensively like a lovely old port. Seven years and counting. Let’s hope it tastes good when it comes out. At PMQs, David Cameron replied to
Truth, Lies, Diana Charing Cross Theatre, in rep until 14 February John Conway’s sensationalist play, Truth, Lies, Diana, is a forensic re-examination of the circumstances surrounding the princess’s death in 1997. The issue of Prince Harry’s paternity, which earned the play much advance publicity, reaches no conclusions. James Hewitt co-operated with the show and Conway portrays
‘Fucking hell. You twat. Fuck off. Fuck. Fuck.’ These dispiriting words are the opening line of Tree, a newish play by the lugubrious comic Daniel Kitson, whose stand-up show once transported me into the heavenly arms of Lethe. His script opens with a chance encounter between two oddball smart Alecs. The outdoor setting, borrowed from
Would he say no to saying no? The first question at PMQs, from Gregg McClymont, was about Cameron’s vote in the EU referendum, (if it ever happens). McClymont wants the PM to rule out ruling out Britain’s participation in the economic suicide pact based in Brussels. Nope, said Cameron. He went on to boast that
The Young Vic produces shows that please many but rarely me. Its big hit of 2014, A Streetcar Named Desire, won virtually every prize going apart from the one it deserved: the year’s deadliest assault on a much-loved classic. The modernised setting offered us a tactless, shirty Blanche DuBois, played by Gillian Anderson as a
Everyone predicted a sombre PMQs. It was anything but. A mood of opportunistic and lacerating silliness dominated today’s exchanges. The NHS – poor thing – was fought over like a bunny rabbit caught by two packs of ravening hounds. Miliband’s aim was to take the word ‘crisis’ and gum it to the health service with
A masterpiece at the National. A masterpiece of persuasion and bewitchment. Croatian word-athlete Tena Stivicic has miraculously convinced director Howard Davies that she can write epic historical theatre. And Davies has transmitted his gullibility to Nicholas Hytner, who must have OK’d this blizzard of verbiage rather than converting it into biofuel and sparing us a
1. The play of the year, by a mile, was Fathers and Sons at the Donmar adapted from Turgenev’s novel. Lindsey Turner directed Brian Friel’s harrowing and exhilarating script with immense visual aplomb. 2. Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be Lionel Bart’s first musical was a sublimely witty look at the Cockney underworld starring Gary
Time travel came to PMQs today. The leaders discussed what year it will be in 2020. The answer, naturally, isn’t 2020. Ed Miliband quoted the OBR and claimed that the Coalition plans to shrink the state to the sort of slim-line figure it last sported in the 1930s. Rubbish, said Cameron. His diet will trim
‘What is a panto?’ I asked my companion at the Hackney Empire’s Saturday matinee. ‘It’s basically a really bad play,’ said Coco, aged five and three quarters. She was there with her older brother and my son to help me appreciate the Christmas frolics. Half an hour in, I feigned confusion over the storyline. ‘People
Cameron is away in Ankara. His mission is to annoy the Germans by inviting Turkey to join the EU as soon as possible. It all sounds like fun. Let’s hope the Turks know they’re being used as pawns in a much bigger game. His absence left Deputy Clegg facing Deputy Harman at PMQs. Clegg’s chief
Janet Suzman’s throwaway comment about the theatre being ‘a white invention’ has attracted a storm of opportunistic derision. What Dame Janet may have meant was this. Theatre is gossip ceremonially presented. And the dramatic structures devised by the Athenians in the 5th century BC raised the form to such a pitch of excellence that the offspring
Head upstairs. That’s my tip for thirsty play-goers during the interval. Most West End theatres are sunken affairs built in scooped-out craters, and this quirk of their design places the stalls 20 feet beneath the earth’s crust (hence the belly-rumble of Tube trains that wakens sleepy-heads during Twelfth Night or The Winter’s Tale). So the
When to launch? For impresarios, this is the eternal dilemma. Autumn is so crowded with press nights that producers are heard to sigh, ‘The market’s full. There’s no room.’ When the glut abates in late November, the same producers sob, ‘The market’s empty. There’s no point.’ But national rags have to report on something, even
Osborne got his chance to audition for Number 10 today. He hasn’t the fluency and the synthetic chumminess of Cameron. And his emotional range is far narrower than the PM’s. He’s like Nigel Lawson, cool, uneasy, watchful. His brain-power is more than his head can bear and there’s a detached, arrhythmic otherness about him. He’s
Bombay is now called Mumbai by everyone bar its residents, whose historic name (from the Portuguese for ‘beautiful cove’) has been discarded for them by their betters. Near the airport a huge advertising board bearing the slogan ‘Beautiful Forever’ overlooks an alp of discarded junk where homeless paupers crouching in tin shacks toil and slave
Health, health, health. Viewers of PMQs must be sick of it by now. Health this, health that. Health, health. On and on. Ad nauseam. Today’s exchanges involved the usual tussle over which Superman can save the NHS. Dave and his virile economy or Ed with his honked out assertions that he’s the patient’s champion? The
‘It’s not as bad as I thought it would be,’ said Norman Mailer to his wife, Norris Church, after reading the first chapters of a novel she wrote in the 1970s. It took her decades to recover from this accolade and the book remained unpublished until 2000. Here’s a two-handed drama she drafted in the
