Theatre

Streetcar. One word is enough to conjure an icon. Tennessee Williams’s finest play, written in the 1940s, is about a fallen woman trying to salvage her reputation before madness overwhelms her. All its horror and tension rely on the Victorian code that required a single woman to appear morally pure or to face ruin in the marriage market. The 1960s destroyed those conventions and this modern-day version feels like a lawsuit being pursued by a stammering counsel interrogating a corpse. The questions are baffling, the answers non-existent. Director Benedict Andrews trusts his own instincts far too much and the author’s not at all. To evoke the lush, exotic heat of Louisiana, he goes for Danish minimalism and clean white surfaces.

Carrie Cracknell’s new version of Medea strikes with overwhelming and rather puzzling force. The royal palace has been done up to resemble a clapped-out Spanish villa that seems to date from about 1983 if the kennel-sized TV set is anything to go by. (Weren’t TVs massive then? And always brown.) The villa’s peeling wallpaper and suppurating marble edifices form a balcony that straddles an eerie little copse, which manages to look both indoors and outdoors at once. These warring effects — villa and forest — do little to elucidate the play’s simple story: jilted Medea avenges herself on love rat Jason by murdering their two sons and bumping off his new sex-bunny.

Torben Betts, head boy at Alan Ayckbourn’s unofficial school of apprentices, has written at least a dozen plays I’ve never seen. Invincible, my first encounter with the heir apparent, is a sitcom that pitches London snobs against northern slobs. The script is fascinating because it demonstrates, in concentrated form, the limitations of the Ayckbourn method and the narrowness of his psychological palette. The characters are emanations of tribal prejudices rather than flesh-and-blood human beings. The plot begins with two earnest Islington prigs moving ‘up north’ after losing money in the recession. Where exactly ‘up north’ is unclear but the accents suggest Blackburn. The pair could win prizes for ghastliness. He’s a stammering emotional eunuch.

Mr Bean, one of our greatest comic exports, has an alter ego. The second Mr Bean, forename Richard, is the author of One Man, Two Guvnors, which thrilled audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. His latest play, Great Britain, dissects the corruption of power in parliament and beyond. The inevitable comparisons with The Duck House, which mocked the expenses scandal, are a little unfair, since the temperament and the intention of the two shows are vastly different. The Duck House was a delicious slice of theatrical levity about a Home Counties couple drawn into criminality by the culture of parliament. And being a family comedy, it had reserves of emotional warmth that Mr Bean’s scabrous blast of satire entirely lacks.

Hampstead’s new play about the 1984 miners’ strike was nearly defeated by technical glitches. Centre stage in Ed Hall’s production there’s a clanking great iron chute that stubbornly refused to go up and down when ordered. A bit like the miners. The writer, Beth Steel, is a collier’s daughter and she romanticises the pit workers to the point where they seem like an exotic species of humming bird. Brave, high-minded and selfless, these noble sons of toil go marching off to the pithead every day to hack and burrow their way through the depths of hell. Into the elevator they trudge, their shovels resting on their shoulders, their voices uplifted in song.

Fashion Victim — the Musical!. There’s a title that’s been waiting to be used for ages. The Cinema Museum is a frumpy warehouse, tucked away in a Kennington backwater, crammed with big-screen memorabilia. A cobwebby salon fitted with a catwalk serves as the theatre. Charmingly camp Carl Mullaney kicks things off by introducing the cast as if they’re already Hollywood legends. Which they are. In their heads. The storyline is eccentric and a little out of step with the world it seeks to mock. A Canadian wannabe, Mimi Steel, descends on London determined to become a superstar. She seduces a Parisian hunk, Cedric Chevalier, whose list of contacts is sufficiently high-powered to confer success on anyone.

Nice one, Roy. Across the West End secret toasts are being drunk to the England supremo for his exquisitely crafted belly flop in Brazil. A decent run by our boys in the World Cup has the potential to put a nasty dent in the box-office takings. As a welcome home present the lads deserve free tickets to Hobson’s Choice at the Open Air Theatre. The play is one of those dependable classics that directors don’t entirely trust. Few can resist the temptation to give it a tweak or stick it in a time machine. The storyline has the simplicity and boldness of a fairy tale. Hobson, a despotic widower, forces his three daughters to toil in his shoe shop for no wages. His eldest girl, Maggie, persuades a spineless underling, Willie Mossop, to marry her.

Fans of Chekhov have to endure both feast and famine. Feast because his works are revived everywhere. Famine because he concentrated all his riches in just four great plays that grow stale with repetition. For fresh nourishment we turn to Brian Friel, whose stage adaptations of the short stories go some way to appease our hunger. In 1987, Friel applied his skills to Fathers and Sons, by Turgenev, which is now revived at the Donmar. The magical charm of a Russian estate is superbly conjured by Rob Howell’s set. Slatted timbers and peeling paintwork. Golden shafts of sunlight falling on crimson rugs and scattered wicker baskets.

It’s hilarious. It’s also annoying that it’s so hilarious. Jonathan Munby’s earthy and glamorous production of Antony and Cleopatra goes almost too far to please the Globe’s fidgety, giggly crowds. The Egyptian queen is often treated as a female Lear, a trophy role, a lap of honour for a transatlantic facelift as she enters her bus-pass years. But Eve Best is the same age, around 40, as the real thing, and she invests the character with a fine mixture of romanticism, majesty and erotic guile. She also has a strong Home Counties branding. Slender-limbed and deeply tanned, she drifts around her palace in a range of floaty white linen dresses. Her dark-brown hair extensions wouldn’t disgrace a Clairol advert.

Lionel is a king of the New York art scene. An internationally renowned connoisseur, he travels the world creating and destroying fortunes. He anoints a masterpiece, here. He defenestrates a forgery, there. He visits the Californian city of Bakersfield (code in America for Nowheresville) to determine the authenticity of a Jackson Pollock bought for three bucks in a garage sale by an unemployed drunk named Maude. This is a great set-up. Power meets destitution. Sophistication frowns at simplicity. Wealth hits the dirt-heap. It’s enormous fun, too. As the impeccably tailored Lionel walks into Maude’s cluttered hovel, he’s attacked by two ravening Alsatians. She offers him a whisky ‘to take the edge off’. ‘I’d rather keep the edge on.

Joan Littlewood’s greatest disservice to the theatre was to champion ‘the right to fail’, which encouraged writers and directors to inflict a thousand shades of bilge on play-goers for many decades. But she deserves a place in the pantheon for an inspired decision taken in 1959. Offered a new play about Soho’s underworld, written by the ex-con Frank Norman, she invited a young pop composer to turn it into a larky musical. Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be opened at Littlewood’s East End lair and transferred to the Garrick where it ran for nearly 900 performances. The young composer was Lionel Bart.

How do you write a play? Here’s one theory. Put a guy up a tree, throw rocks at him, get him down again. It’s a good working template. Nick Payne’s latest script, Incognito, uses a different scheme. You put 21 guys up a tree, set them jabbering for 90 minutes and then go home. This cumbersome structure is greatly damaged by the decision to hire just four actors to play all 21 characters. And the locations, covering six decades, leap so often between Britain and America as to induce dizziness and possibly vomiting. There are no changes of costume, or set, to indicate where you are. You just have to guess. One storyline involves a camp young Brit with chronic amnesia. Another traces a Scottish physicist who is turning, rather grandly, into a lesbian.

The Silver Tassie is the major opening at the Lyttelton this spring. Sean O’Casey’s rarely staged play introduces us to a group of Dublin sportsmen, and their womenfolk, as they prepare to volunteer for service on the Western Front. They parade the ‘silver tassie’, a newly won football trophy, mistakenly believing it to presage victory and good fortune. O’Casey’s characterisation is a little perfunctory. The men are boastful studs, quailing dolts, blarneying drunks or violent despots. The women aren’t much better: a weeping mum, a caustic shrew, a battered martyr, a snooty beauty. It may sound colourful but the storyline develops at the pace of tree rings.

Off to the Gate for a special treat: a pious anti-war monologue from the prize-winning American George Brant. Curtain up. And within seconds all my preachy prejudices have fallen apart. The speaker is a female pilot in a jump suit sealed within a see-through cage. Slaying men is her vocation. Interesting! The story moves with amazing deftness and clarity. She flies missions over Iraq. Loves it. The speed, the jeopardy, the power, the solitude. ‘The blue’ is her term for her intoxicating and deadly haven in the skies. Home on leave, she hits the bars. A one-night stand. She likes the guy. Back in Iraq, she’s pregnant. Skypes him. He weeps with joy. She’s honourably discharged. Back home, they marry. A daughter arrives. She’s settled and fulfilled.

Cripes. How did I get that one wrong? A few issues back I blithely predicted that Harry Hill’s musical I Can’t Sing would run for three years. It closes this month, so I’m a little reluctant to praise another glittering comedy, Relative Values by Noël Coward, which, like Hill’s stricken satire, has received a few snubs from the critics. In his early dramas, Coward portrayed servants as amiable bunglers or bossy cynics and he rarely gave them more than one wisecrack per act. In Hay Fever, for example, the leading lady can’t even recall the housekeeper’s name, and her forgetfulness is supposed to be funny and attractive. Relative Values dates from 1951, when domestic service was in decline and social divisions were being steam-rollered flat.

Rewrite the history books! Tradition tells us that kitchen-sink drama began in 1956 with Look Back in Anger. A season of lost classics at the White Bear Theatre has unearthed a gritty below-stairs play that predates John Osborne’s breakthrough by five years. Women of Twilight by Sylvia Rayman (which has transferred to the Pleasance) was a thumping West End hit in the early 1950s. It spawned several touring productions, one of which featured the young June Whitfield. When the script was filmed in 1952 it became the first British feature to attract the enticing ‘X’ certificate (over 18s only). The setting is a lodging house in Hampstead where unmarried mothers are crammed together, three to a room.

Another Country was an instant response to Anthony Blunt’s exposure in 1979 as a Marxist spy. Julian Mitchell set out to explain how gay public-school toffs, reared in a system of hypocrisy and backstabbing, could betray their country. At a time when Soviet communism was a potent and growing menace, this issue grabbed play-goers by the throat. Today’s audiences will find different sources of topicality. The school system itself seems rather admirable and idyllic, if a little rough around the edges. The play could almost be a YouTube advert for Eton. All that’s missing is the ethnic kaleidoscope. There are no Indian or Chinese pupils, no Sikh bodyguards patrolling the grounds, no Filipino food-tasters tentatively sipping the turtle broth of a Saudi dauphin.

I Can’t Sing! is a parody of The X Factor, which already parodies itself at every turn. Quite a tough call. The heroine is an oppressed no-hoper stuck in a tiny caravan under the Westway with her crippled dad who lives in an iron lung. She longs for a chance to win stardom and wealth on a TV talent show. So this is the Cinderella story with a lot of grotesque and absurd modern detailing. Is it good? No. It’s spectacularly brilliant. A hit musical needs to get everything right and this one does just that. The sets are lavish and sumptuous. The costumes are razor-sharp parodies of underclass loser-wear. The title song has a soaring climax that tugs at the heart-strings and fills the spirit with strange and unexpected yearnings. Some reviewers have found the show cruel.