Theatre

Alan Bennett’s new play, Allelujah!, is an NHS drama set in a friendly hospital in rural Yorkshire. Colin, an ambitious local boy turned metropolitan yuppie, has arrived from London to visit his sick father and he takes the opportunity to assess the efficiency of the hospital on behalf of his bosses at the health department in Whitehall. Meanwhile, a TV crew has found evidence that a staff member is murdering elderly patients to create vacant beds for new arrivals. Bennett’s sentimental adoration of the NHS leads him to misrepresent a couple of political issues. It’s false to suggest that any well-run hospital is bound to be flogged to the commercial sector. And although he laments ‘privatisation’, he neglects to mention that it was introduced by Labour.

Stefano Massini’s play opens with a man in a frock-coat reaching New York after six weeks at sea. The year is 1844 and young Henry Lehman has just emigrated from Bavaria to make his fortune. He started modestly with a general store in Montgomery, Alabama, serving local farmers. When wildfires destroyed the cotton crop on which the community relied, Lehman’s business ought to have failed but he saw his opportunity. Whatever possessions the farmers had lost they would have to purchase again. From him. He was joined by his brothers, Manny and Mayer, and they invented the profession of brokerage, ‘middle-men’ they called themselves, buying raw cotton from farmers and selling it on to the clothing factories.

The Lieutenant of Inishmore is a knockabout farce set during the Troubles. Like Monty Python’s dead parrot sketch it uses the expiry of a pet to examine human obsessiveness and self-delusion. But it takes two hours rather than three minutes to make its point. We meet a handsome terrorist, Padraic (Aidan Turner), whose adoration of his black cat symbolises his crazed devotion to republicanism. The cat is accidentally run over by Davey, an amiable twerp on a bike, who must find a new cat or face reprisals from the insanely brutal Padraic. Donny, Padraic’s dad, offers to help Davey and they borrow a ginger cat, which they blacken with boot polish. That’s the level of narrative ingenuity here: children’s television.

Listen to the crowd. I often delay passing judgment on a show until the audience delivers its verdict. This is especially true of plays that appeal primarily to women. Genesis Inc. by Jemma Kennedy presents us with two infertile mums. Serena is a clingy worrier whose aloof boyfriend, Jeff, resents forking out thousands for IVF. Bridget, a cocky City power-dresser, is keen to get herself impregnated by her gay best friend. Serena and Bridget don’t meet until the final scene so the play feels like two separate dramas, poorly merged. The fertility clinic, Genesis Inc., is owned by the smarmy Dr Marshall (Harry Enfield). He wants the firm to go public so he hires one of his customers, cocky Bridget, to handle the flotation.

Intriguing word, ‘octoroon’. Does it mean an eight-sided almond-flavoured cakelet? No, it’s a person whose ancestry is one eighth black. New Yorker Branden Jacobs-Jenkins wants to explore this factoid in his farce An Octoroon, which opens with an angry African-American playwright delivering a comic monologue. He tells us a story about ‘my shrink’. Then he tells us that ‘my shrink’ doesn’t exist. Then he talks about ‘my shrink’ again. Right, so is ‘my shrink’ real or not? Obviously the writer doesn’t care. A second dramatist enters, an Irishman, in Victorian costume. This is Dion Boucicault, a 19th-century writer whose comedies were enormously popular in London and on Broadway.

Polly Stenham starts her overhaul of Strindberg’s Miss Julie with the title. She gives the ‘Miss’ a miss and calls it Julie. The wonder of Strindberg is that his characters speak to us with such force, knowingness and candour that they seem to belong to our own era. Modernising the setting destroys the wonder. This is a textbook lesson in how to kill by transplantation. We’re in a London mansion owned by an absent billionaire whose chauffeur, Jean, is casually seduced by a trustafarian coke fiend, Julie, on the night of her 33rd birthday. Julie’s motives are lust, boredom, a need for attention and a perfunctory desire to sabotage Jean’s forthcoming marriage to Kristina the cleaner, a bombshell from Brazil.

Oh, what a beautiful morning! In Jo Davies’s production of Oklahoma! the audience spends the overture staring at the side of a barn. Then, as birdsong rises from the orchestra, corrugated-iron doors slide open on a dustbowl farm of the 1930s. Aunt Eller (Claire Moore) is fixing a tractor, and a wind pump spins slowly against an orange dawn sky. It’s mildly surreal: the light falls as if in one of those New Deal-era western landscape paintings, with a jagged, David Smith-like sculpture of pitchforks and shovels serving as a tree. And then, with throwaway ease, Dex Lee as Curly launches into that greatest of all Broadway opening numbers. Davies catches Rodgers and Hammerstein’s surge of hope on the upswing, and rides it in a single sweep from beginning to end.

Tracy Letts begins his trailer-trash comedy Killer Joe with the corniest of platitudes. A runaway druggie named Chris Smith needs $6,000 to stop ‘some guys’ from killing him. He asks his dad who declares himself skint but together they plot to bump off Mrs Smith, Chris’s mum, and collect her life insurance. Interesting idea. Luckily there’s a hitman available who works as a cop and goes by the sobriquet, ‘Killer Joe’. (Note to police forces everywhere: an officer whose nickname suggests a second career as an assassin may be worth investigating.) Joe wants payment up front and the penniless conspirators offer him Chris’s attractive sister, Dottie, as a ‘forward loan’.

Regime change at the Globe. The new boss, Michelle Terry, wants a 50/50 ratio of males to females in each production. Rather eccentric. Why cast a drama to reflect the distribution of sexual organs across the general populace? Imagine hiring an orchestra to represent the ratio of citizens who can play an instrument. And didn’t the process of examining actor’s genitals at auditions land Harvey Weinstein in a spot of bother? Ms Terry’s gender fixation is called, curiously enough, ‘gender-blind casting’. She inaugurates her reign at the Globe by offering us a production of Hamlet in which, perhaps with a nod to gender-blind casting, she plays the lead. No one but Ms Terry would have hired Ms Terry for this role.

The Bridge’s big summer show is Nightfall by prize-winning newcomer Barney Norris. Widowed Jenny wants her grown-up kids, Lou and Ryan, to help her run their farm in Hampshire following their dad’s death. But Lou’s boyfriend, Pete, has been offered work abroad. That’s the only major snag in this low-wattage rustic melodrama. The back story involves a secret abortion and a criminal assault for which the wrong person was imprisoned, but the plot centres on clingy Jenny’s desire to curb her nippers’ wanderlust. She’s a needy chatterbox who isn’t entirely without charm, and the same could be said of the other ho-hum characters who pass their time sprawling on a scruffy lawn, boozing and nattering.

Describe the Night opens in Poland in 1920 where two Russian soldiers, Isaac and Nikolai, discuss truth and falsehood. Next we’re in Smolensk, 2010, where some strangers scream at each other about a hire car. Next Moscow, 1931 (or 1937 — the surtitles are illegible), where Nikolai, now a top soldier, asks Isaac, now a successful screen-writer, to audition his wife for a movie. Isaac improvises a scene with the wife and then fondles her bottom as they perform a weirdly sexless dance that is supposed to symbolise something, but it’s unclear what because everything that preceded the dance was indecipherable. Then the interval. I looked for enlightenment in the programme notes and discovered what the play is supposed to be about. It’s fascinating stuff.

Nine Night refers to a Jamaican custom that obliges bereaved families to party non-stop for more than a week following the death of a parent. When Gloria expires her relatives arrive from all parts of London and the Caribbean to indulge in a boozy blow-out. Gloria’s daughter Lorraine tussles with her businessman brother, Robert, who wants to stave off bankruptcy by flogging the family home immediately. Their half-sister, Trudy, arrives from Jamaica and collapses in hysterics over her abandonment by Gloria in infancy. Everyone lives in fear of Auntie Maggie, a pious matriarch, who uses a walking stick and whose religious devotion conceals the heart of an emotional despot. Cecilia Noble (Maggie) delivers a tour de force as the nit-picking hypochondriac.

Ella Hickson’s last play at the Almeida was a sketch show about oil. Her new effort uses the same episodic format ornamented with ‘meta-textual experimentation’ (i.e. plotless confusion). The central character is a brilliant young female writer who finds that all male theatre directors are boorish cynical greedy philistine racist sex pests. In Sketch One she meets a smarmy monster twice her age who tries to seduce her with the offer of a script commission. Sketch Two is a commentary on Sketch One, which turns out to have been a play within a play. Sketch Three shows the writer cohabiting with a loser who ‘sells football boots’. The loser has just bought a new sofa (with her money) and he baptises it with an enforced bout of loveless copulation.

‘Hunt the Flop’, the Royal Court’s bizarre quest for dud plays, has found a candidate for this year’s overall prize. Instructions for Correct Assembly by Thomas Eccleshare is a family satire set in the near future. Plot: suburban parents replace their missing son with a computerised cyborg which malfunctions. That’s it. Were this a pitch for a TV sketch show the producer would say, ‘OK, but then what?’ The answer here is virtually nothing. Early on, the cyborg makes embarrassing political statements and expresses support for Brexit. The parents hastily silence him using a hand-held device that returns him to their dead-safe Guardianista outlook.

Quiz by James Graham looks at the failed attempt in 2001 to swindle a million quid from an ITV game show. Jackpot winner Major Charles Ingram was thought to have been helped by strategic coughs emanating from Tecwen Whittock, a fellow contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Graham, best known for his gripping political dramas, can’t muster any passion for this story or his characters. Ingram is a posh, weepy lummox. His wife, Diana, comes across as a blur of aloofness, cunning and banality. Whittock, who claimed to suffer from a persistent throat condition, is a clueless hobbit with a wonky Welsh accent. And Diana’s brother, tangentially involvedin the drama, is an amiably bumbling spendthrift. The material has a built-in problem. Whose side are we on?

David Haig’s play Pressure looks at the Scottish meteorologist, James Stagg, who advised Eisenhower about the weather in the week before D-Day. The play works by detaching us from our foreknowledge of events. We’re aware that the landings went off smoothly on 6 June in fine conditions. However, D-Day was originally scheduled for 5 June, and for the preceding month southern England had basked in a prolonged sunny spell. According to Eisenhower’s American meteorologist, this was set to continue. But Stagg believed a storm was about to engulf the channel. Eisenhower trusted Stagg and postponed D-Day. The storm arrived, albeit tardily, which vindicated Stagg who then foresaw a brief period of clear skies and low winds for the following day. Eisenhower trusted him again.

Ruthless! The Musical is a camp extravaganza about ambitious actors stranded in small-town America. Sylvia St Croix, a pushy agent, visits a super-talented 10-year-old, Tina, and persuades her to audition for Pippi Longstocking in a school play. Tina’s mother fears that stardom may spoil her little girl but Tina is finished with childhood. ‘Time to move on.’ The production feels like a zany Spike Milligan sketch with a garish set and over-the-top costumes. Sylvia is played by Justin Gardiner who swaggers about like a cross-dressing cowboy in a clingy frock and false breasts. The dialogue, which takes cheap shots at bourgeois morality, may not suit all tastes. Try this. Tina complains to Sylvia that she never sees her father.

The Plough and the Stars by Sean O’Casey looks at the Irish nationalist movement during the events of Easter 1916. The setting is a Dublin tenement where the residents exchange gossip and insults and sometimes punches. What begins as an elevated soap opera develops into a tragedy of vast and harrowing proportions. Sean Holmes’s production was first seen at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre and it tells the historic tale with contemporary costumes and furnishings. These chronological confusions rarely work but the performers here have so much spirit, energy and truthfulness that the narrative feels immediate and topical. The set is spare, unlovely, brutal.

Summer and Smoke by Tennessee Williams dates from the late 1940s. He hadn’t quite reached the peaks of sentimental delicacy he found in his golden period but he was getting there. As a lesser-known curiosity, the script deserves a production that explains itself openly and plainly. Rebecca Frecknall has directed a beautiful and sometimes bizarre-looking show which is beset by ‘great ideas’. What a great idea to encircle the stage with upright pianos that the actors can cavort on, and whose exposed innards can twinkle with atmospheric lights at poignant moments. The pianos are an ingenious and handsome solo effort but they serve the designer’s ends and not the play’s. Another great idea was to include a booming soundtrack, often irrelevant, sometimes intrusive.