National theatre

The Playboy of the Western World is like the state opening of parliament. Worth seeing once. Director Caitriona McLaughlin delivers a faithful production of John Millington Synge’s grand satire about dim-witted Oirish peasants and, perhaps unwisely, she spreads the show across the entire length of the vast Lyttelton stage. It looks as if it’s being performed on a railway platform. The drama consists of several broad, daring and improbable steps. A handsome farmer’s boy, Christy, rolls up in a sleepy village in Co. Mayo and claims to have murdered his father. The lustful local girls treat him as a hero rather than an outlaw and compete for his hand in

End is the title chosen by David Eldridge for his new relationship drama. Clive Owen and Saskia Reeves star as Alfie and Julie, a pair of wildly successful creative types who live in a mansion near Highgate. Both are 59. Alfie is a retired DJ who made a fortune touring the world at the height of the ecstasy craze and Julie earns a living from crime fiction. But she’s bored with detective stories and wants to publish her memoirs and to write a state-of-the-nation novel set during the 2012 Olympics. Despite their amazing careers, both characters are moaning dimwits who swear constantly and have nothing of value to say about

Hamlet at the National opens like a John Lewis Christmas advert. Elegant celebrations are in progress. The stage is full of dining tables draped in white linen and adorned with flowers and beautiful glassware sparkling in the candlelight. Elsinore is reimagined as the home of a multicultural royal family. Claudius, resplendent in a dark dinner jacket, toasts his Asian bride, Gertrude, who wears a banana-yellow sari. Enter Hamlet, hunched and mutinous, in a snaky black suit like a moody star at a film première. He cheers up when he reaches his first soliloquy which he delivers to the crowd like a larky routine at a comedy club. Hiran Abeysekera (Hamlet)

Inter Alia, a new play from the creators of Prima Facie, follows the hectic double life of Jess, a crown court judge, played by Rosamund Pike. As a high-flying lawyer with a family to care for, she knows that ‘having it all’ means ‘doing it all’. When not in court, she skivvies non-stop for her indolent husband and her useless son, who telephones her at work to ask why his Hawaiian shirt isn’t in the fridge where he left it. She races home, finds the shirt, irons it back and front, and then starts to prepare supper for eight guests. Husband and son pretend to help by Frisbeeing the dinner

The Estate begins with a typical NHS story. An elderly Sikh arrives in A&E after a six-hour wait for an ambulance and he’s asked to collect his own vomit in an NHS bucket. The doctors tell him he’s fine and sends him home where he promptly dies. His only son, Angad, inherits all his property, which irritates his two daughters, who receive nothing. The personality of the dead Sikh is left deliberately obscure. Newspapers in Britain and India publish glowing accounts of his achievements but his youngest daughter calls him ‘a slum landlord’ who owed his fortune to ‘a lifetime of tax-evasion’. The bad-tempered tussle over his will takes place

The Score is a fine example of meat-and-potatoes theatre. Simple plotting, big characters, terrific speeches and a happy ending. The protagonist, J.S. Bach, receives a mysterious summons from Frederick the Great of Prussia. The long first act takes us through Bach’s professional woes and his physical infirmities. His weak vision is being treated by an English oculist, John Taylor, who tours Europe in a scarlet coach decorated with eyes. For unexplained reasons, Taylor decides to taste Bach’s urine, which is excessively sugary – a symptom of diabetes. When Bach reaches Frederick’s court in Potsdam he finds the atmosphere oppressive and alienating. Enter Voltaire. ‘Prussia is not a state in possession

Weird play, Coriolanus. It’s like a playground fight that spills out into the street and has to be resolved by someone’s mum. The hero is a Roman general whose enemies conspire to banish him so he takes revenge by joining forces with a foreign power and laying siege to Rome. Coriolanus’s mother shows up on the battlefield and begs him to drop his vendetta and come back home. Later he dies but without delivering a big speech. The Roman soldiers have plastic swords that go ‘clack’ rather than metal ones that go ‘ching’ The key difficulty is that Coriolanus’s tragic flaw, a lack of ambition, is really a virtue. He’s

Our subsidised theatres often import shows from the US without asking whether our theatrical tastes align with America’s. The latest arrival, The Hot Wing King, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning play about unhealthy eating. The production opens in a luxury house in Memphis, occupied, rather strangely, by four gay men who dress gracelessly in cheap, flashy designer gear. They behave like overgrown babies and spend their time leaping about the place, bickering and bantering, singing songs, performing dance moves and exchanging cuddles. This cameo repeats the caricature of the foolish African crook. Why is the Globe perpetuating racial bigotry? One of the four man-babies wears a business suit and calls himself

Our Mutual Friend has been turned into a musical with a new title, London Tide, which sounds duller and more forgettable than the original. Why change the name? To confuse fans of Dickens, presumably, and to keep the theatre half-empty while heaps of tickets are sold at a discount. At the end of Act One, an actor explains the entire plot. This might have been delivered earlier The plot is a cheesy Victorian whodunnit involving three main characters and multiple locations so it’s hard to follow the action as it flits from this lowly hovel to that seedy tavern. The chief personalities are a pretentious lawyer, a psychotic teacher and

For centuries no one knew who it was by or even what it was of. The picture that had hung unnoticed in a succession of noble palazzi in the Italian province of Salerno, with its deep chiaroscuro and close-cropped composition, looked like a Caravaggio – but after Caravaggio almost every painting in Naples did. When it entered the collection of the Banca Commerciale Italiana in 1973 it was attributed to Mattia Preti, a Calabrian Caravaggista of the next generation who had caught the tenebrist bug. But in 1980, a letter discovered in the Naples State Archive changed the picture. Written on 11 May 1610 by Lanfranco Massa – the Naples

Green, green, green. Everything on stage is the same shade of eau de Nil in the NT’s version of Federico García Lorca’s classic, The House of Bernarda Alba. All the furniture and props are green. The mirrors, the walls, the crucifixes, the clocks and even the bucket and the knife-rack bear the same queasy pigment. The idea, perhaps, is to suggest a lunatic asylum or an NHS waiting room. Lorca’s steamy tale is set in a remote Spanish village in the 1930s where life is dominated by the repressive and superstitious Catholic church. The story opens with a nasty matriarch, Bernarda Alba, celebrating her husband’s death by ordering her five

The director of the National Theatre will be stepping down in 2025. I’ve written to the chairman offering a new vision for Britain’s leading playhouse. Dear Sir Damon Buffini, I’m a reviewer of plays and a part-time theatre producer. In the past 20 years I’ve seen more than 2,000 shows, hundreds of them at your venue, and here is my plan to transform the NT. Britain’s dramatic heritage is the best in the world and our national theatre should meet that standard of excellence. Three simple reforms to start with. US stars crave the prestige offered by the NT. Each year we will hire half a dozen Oscar-winning actors One:

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, are fed an experimental love potion that may help medics to find a cure for narcissists suffering from depression. Running the experiment are two weird boffins, Professor Brainstorm and Nurse Snooty, who once enjoyed a fling at a conference and whose lust is not entirely extinct. But Nurse Snooty is playing hard to get. ‘Sometimes,’

Clunk, clunk, clunk. John Gabriel Borkman opens with the obsessive footfalls of a disgraced banker as he prowls the attic of a shabby townhouse. On a beaten-up sofa lies Gunhild, his estranged wife, who guzzles Coke and watches TV game shows. The whole place stinks of stagnation and failure. The reclusive Borkman was once the country’s best-known banker until envious colleagues accused him of embezzlement and got him sent to jail for five years. After his release, he began a life of self-destructive solitude. The family are more riven with feuds than the royals. Gunhild loathes her twin sister, Ella, while Borkman blames both women for his downfall. His one

Simon Godwin’s Much Ado About Nothing is set in a steamy Italian holiday resort, the Hotel Messina, in the 1920s. A smart move, design-wise. The jazz age was one of those rare moments in history when every member of society, from the lowliest chambermaid to the richest aristocrat, dressed with impeccable style and flair. The show is stupendously good to look at it and it kicks off with a thrilling blast of rumba music from a jazz quartet on the hotel balcony. Even sceptics of jazz need not fear these players. The musical score is a triumph for one simple reason: there are no jazz solos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjn_HputD2U The comic passages

Dictating to the Estate is a piece of community theatre that explains why Grenfell Tower went up in flames on 14 June 2017. The abandoned block stands, like a cenotaph, a few minutes’ walk from the social club where the show is presented. The local council never cared much for Grenfell’s 120 families. Plans to destroy the tower and expand the estate – with higher rents, of course – had long been under discussion. A one-bedroom flat in west London goes for half a million pounds so there were profits galore to be made. ‘A gold mine for the council,’ said one developer, ‘and they don’t even have to dig

‘I fink I doan luv yew any maw.’ A marital bust-up drama at the National Theatre opens with a whining Cockney, Maggie, telling her City whizzkid husband Gary that their relationship is over. Gary and Maggie are aspriring underclass types who’ve achieved bourgeois prosperity: John Lewis kitchen, vintage wine rack and a ceramics collection. They have an eight-year-old daughter at a private school where she learns ballet steps and the piano instead of watching road-rage videos on YouTube like a council-house kid. She’s called Annabelle, by the way, and one wonders if Gary and Maggie style themselves ‘Garfield and Margaret’ at the school gate. It’s hard to know why a

A Number, by Caryl Churchill, is a sci-fi drama of impenetrable complexity. It’s set in a future society where cloning has become possible for those on modest incomes. A Cockney father reveals to his grown-up son that he’s a replica of his older brother who died, aged four, in a car crash that also killed his mum. The son reacts with anger and bafflement. But Dad soothes him with happy news. The boy’s DNA was stolen by a gang of scientists who created 20 more copycat zombies, and these replicas are now scattered across the globe. Dad plans to cash in by suing the boffins for £5 million. No sooner