Lloyd Evans is The Spectator's sketch-writer and theatre critic
Jonah and Otto is a lost-soul melodrama that keeps its audience guessing. Where are we? The Channel coast somewhere. Indoors or out? Not sure. Near a church maybe? Violence barges in. Jonah, a mouthy scruff, shoves a knife in the face of Otto, a dignified old gent with Big Ears whiskers and a dark, elegant
Was that a pop at Hattie? Ed Miliband began PMQs by evoking the centenary of the Great War. ‘We will all be wearing our poppies with particular pride this year,’ he said. And every eye ran along Labour’s front bench to count off the crimson blooms. Balls, poppy. Miliband poppy. Harman, poppy. No, wait. As
Start with a joke. Neville’s Island. Get it? Laughing yet? Are your ribs splitting into pieces? It’s a cracker, isn’t it? Well it’s a pun, at least, on Devil’s Island. Tim Firth’s play, regarded as a modern classic, premiered 22 years ago in Scarborough: Ayckbourn country, and it shows. Four corporate numbskulls on a team-building
The hypocrisy was breath-taking. The opportunism was scandalous. The lack of principle was extraordinary. All the same, it wasn’t a bad move. Ed Miliband used PMQs to attack the Tories for turning Britain’s borders into a gleaming string of electro-magnetic funfairs that attract hopefuls from across the globe. Cameron planned to pass the buck straight
My father came across Dylan Thomas in a Swansea pub in 1947. ‘Chap over there,’ said one of the regulars ‘is a poet.’ ‘What’s his name?’ asked my father. ‘No idea.’ That Thomas’s celebrity was rather patchy, even in his hometown just a few years before his death, illustrates how much his fame owes to
David Baddiel has turned his movie, The Infidel, into a musical. The set-up is so contrived and clumsy that it has a sweetness all its own. A golden-hearted London cabbie, named Mahmoud, discovers that he was adopted at birth and that his real parents were Jewish. This strikes him as intriguing rather than alarming, and
It didn’t work. But it was a good idea. David Cameron prepared an ambush for Ed Miliband at PMQs today. The trouble was he attacked the Labour leader for a vice he himself has mastered with conspicuous aplomb: question dodging. Miliband is clearly in trouble. He’s using his only remaining strength, the NHS, to prop
The age of ‘ladies first’ is back. Phyllida Lloyd reserves all the roles for the weaker sex, as I imagine she thinks of them, in this hybrid play assembled from Henry IV (i) and (ii). It’s a twin-layered production that poses as a piece of am-dram mounted in a women’s nick. The Donmar has been
It was like the last night of the Proms at PMQs. Miliband stood up to hearty roars—Tory roars—that seemed to go on for minutes. This was the longest and most humiliating ovation of his life. But his throat had been hit by a lurgy and his voice was rasping like a misfiring chainsaw. This impairment
First, a bit of background. Conquering Agamemnon slew his daughter, Iphigenia, in return for a fair wind to Troy. This rather miffed his wife, Clytemnestra, who bashed his head in with an axe when he came swaggering home. Her retribution laid a religious duty on their son, Orestes, to avenge his dad by slaying his
Tim and Andy are back. Their monster hit Evita opens the fully refurbed and re-primped Dominion Theatre, which is built on the scale of an airport terminal and needs a big production to fill it. This is a beautiful version of a show that marks a decline in the Tim and Andy alliance. It hasn’t
Suppose Charles were to reign as a meddlesome, self-pitying, indecisive plonker. It’s a thought. It’s now a play, too, by Mike Bartlett. In his opening scene he bumps off Lilibet, bungs her in a box and assembles the family at Buck House to discuss ‘what next?’ Bartlett imagines them as stuck-up divs. William’s a self-righteous
It’s taken a while but here it is. The Play That Goes Wrong is like Noises Off, but simpler. Michael Frayn’s cumbersome backstage farce asked us to follow the actors’ personal stories as well as their on-stage foul-ups, and the surfeit of detail proved a bit of a brain-scrambler. This is a badly rehearsed thriller
These are your lives. Yard Theatre, until 4 October Tom Cruise. That’s the big offer from a newish venue, the Yard Theatre, lurking on the fringes of Hackney Wick. The 80-seat space is located in an upwardly mobile sprawl of discarded warehouses and asset-stripped factories reinvented as artisan boozers. You can get there by train,
Referendum fever reaches Stratford East. Spoiling, by John McCann, takes us into the corridors of power in Holyrood shortly after a triumphant Yes vote. We meet a foul-mouthed bruiser named Fiona whose strident views and vivid language have propelled her into the public eye during the referendum battle. Her reward is Scotland’s foreign ministry. The
Weird times in Westminster. PMQs was downgraded today so that the evening news wouldn’t carry pictures of a remote House of Commons debating the referendum in a complacent and uncaring manner. Passion is today’s watchword. Urgency too. And the personal touch. The party leaders are up north, right now, engaged in a three-legged race to
Eye of a Needle, by newcomer Chris MacDonald, looks at homosexuality and asylum. Gays from the Third World, who’ve suppressed all evidence of their orientation at home, find they have to leap out of the closet once they reach the UK, and provide documentary proof of their hot-tub marathons and nitrate-fuelled rubdowns. Lots of comic
Calamities crowd in every side. Nuclear-armed Russia is already waging war with Europe, according to our NATO ally, Lithuania. At home, Douglas Carswell’s defection threatens to rob the Tories of power. Yet these crises were barely mentioned at PMQs. One source of international conflict has been resolved, at last. Is the name Islamic State? Or
Wow. What an experience. A 1991 movie named Dogfight has spawned a romantic musical. We’re in San Francisco in 1963. Eddie is a swaggering, shaven-headed Marine and Rose is a shy, awkward waitress. Come to a party, he says. She refuses, prevaricates, reconsiders, accepts. They reach the venue; he ignores her. Furtive conversations in corners
Scotland’s on a knife-edge. Like all referendum-watchers at the Edinburgh Festival I grabbed a ticket for The Pitiless Storm, a drama about independence, which attracts big crowds every lunchtime at the Assembly Rooms. The play draws its inspiration from the passion and fury of Red Clydeside. David Hayman, an actor and lifelong leftie, plays a
