Theatre

It’s considered the great masterpiece of 20th-century American drama. Oh, come off it. Long Day’s Journey into Night is a waffle-festival that descends into a torture session. Who would choose to spend time with the Tyrone family? Dad is a skinflint millionaire. Mum is a wittering smack addict. They’ve produced two layabout sons. One is a dipsomaniac with a moustache; the other has TB and a cough. These doomed narcissists chase each other around the family mansion in a spiral of vicious, self-regarding gossip. It’s like being trapped in a broken cable-car with four prattling drunks who hate each other. And I’m not convinced they drink that much. A bottle and a half of whisky, or a little over, is consumed in the course of a day.

Nicholas Hytner’s new show is a modern-dress Julius Caesar, heavily cut and played in the round. It runs for two hours, no interval. The action opens with the audience grouped around a central stage where a ramshackle rock gig descends into a riot. The play unfolds like an illegal rave at a warehouse. It’s bold, in its way, and some of it works. A couple of the Roman senators are played by actresses and the text has been bodged to suit the cult of gender neutrality. ‘Romans’ is substituted for ‘men’ in Mark Antony’s famous line, ‘so are they all, all honourable men’. This small change is curiously painful to hear. It turns the ominous finality of Shakespeare’s original into a tuneless clatter.

The NT’s new production, John, is by a youngish American playwright, Annie Baker. We Brits tend to assume that ‘john’ is American for ‘toilet’ so perhaps lavatorial treats are in store. The setting is a provincial hotel run by a blithering old dear whose only guests are two grumbling yuppies with marriage problems. The plot of a play usually starts within ten minutes but not here: nothing happens. That’s the point. Instead of a story there’s a minor predicament and this, oddly enough, suits the show’s personalities. The yuppies, Elias and Jenny, are just about memorable enough to be human beings but they haven’t the substance or grit for dramatic characters. Their personalities lack density or appetite.

The Birthday Party is among Pinter’s earliest and strangest works. It deconstructs the conventions of a repertory thriller but doesn’t bother to reassemble them. The setting is a derelict seaside town on the south coast. Petey, a thick deckchair attendant, runs a guest-house with his ageing wife, Meg. She’s a zero-IQ cook whose signature dish is a slice of white toast charred in fat. They have one resident, Stanley, a former pianist whom Meg cossets and mothers like a substitute son. Enter two London thugs, Goldberg and McCann, who invite Stanley to a party as a pretext to punish him for unknown misdemeanours. The whisky-soaked celebrations involve a game of blind man’s bluff during which Stanley’s glasses are smashed, rendering him sightless.

A pattern emerges. A hot American playwright, dripping with prestigious awards, is honoured in London with a transfer of their best-known work. And it turns out to be all right. Not bad. Nothing special. The latest wunderkind to wow London is Amy Herzog (five plays performed, six awards received), whose marital bust-up drama Belleville is set in a glamorously derelict corner of Paris. Abby and Zack, both 28, are newlywed Americans trying to shore up the wreckage of their European gap year. Abby wanted to learn French but has stopped attending classes. Instead, she’s studying yoga although the lessons are regularly cancelled. And her acting career seems to have stalled.

The Twilight Zone, an American TV show from the early 1960s, reinvented the ghost story for the age of space exploration. Director Richard Jones has collaborated with Anne Washburn to turn several TV episodes into a single play. Eight episodes in all. Way too many. The structure is designed to bamboozle us from the start. Some of the storylines have been broken up and are placed episodically throughout the piece, while others are preserved as units and delivered whole. Even the most keen-eyed viewer gets flummoxed by this mystery.

A new play at the Bush with a catchy political title. Parliament Square introduces us to Kat, a young Scots mum, who abandons her baby girl and her devoted husband and commutes to London to kill herself. She doesn’t want to die but shrill voices in her head are urging her to turn her body into a human fireball on College Green, opposite parliament. Her political cause is unclear. Her personal hopes are plainly set out: death and posthumous fame. Everything is ready. Kat douses herself in unleaded petrol (it’s not a carbon-neutral protest), and as the flames engulf her flesh she emits a blood-curdler from her solar plexus. ‘The worst scream we’ve ever heard,’ says the stage direction, an aim that the production achieves with more success than one might wish.

Maximum Victoriana at the Old Vic for Matthew Warchus’s A Christmas Carol. Even before we reach our seats we’re accosted by bonneted wenches handing out mince pies. Merchants in top hats roam the aisles proffering satsumas, which they call, with accurate Victorian incorrectness, ‘oranges’. The guts of the theatre have been ripped out for this show. A slender catwalk stretches 40 yards from the rear of the stage to the farthest wall of the auditorium, with the seats gathered around this runway in odd little clumps. The narrow performing area leaves no room for scenery, so Dickens’s London is suggested by dozens of oblong lanterns dangling overhead, like mini-Tardises, all glowing amber, as if recently nuked. Then a soapy blizzard starts.

The inexplicable popularity of Ivo Van Hove continues. The director’s latest visit to the fairies involves an updated version of Network, a creaky and over-rated news satire from 1976. Van Hove appears to be unconstrained by thrift or self-discipline and he fills the Lyttelton stage with expensive clobber. It’s like a hangar full of half-tested prototypes. Centre, a TV studio featuring three cameras and an anchor man’s desk the size of a lifeboat. Behind it, a controller’s gallery with lots of TV monitors shielded by wobbly glass. Stage-rear, a vast flat-screen telly that relays the action as it happens but with an irritating quarter-second delay.

David Mamet’s plays are tough to pull off because his dialogue lacks the predictable shapeliness of traditional dramatic speech. He prefers the sort of meandering, oblique, backtracking and self-deluding conversation you might overhear in a hotel dining-room. Glengarry Glen Ross opens in a restaurant, where a handful of realtors are discussing the perils and joys of their craft. The scene culminates in one of the landmarks of American drama. Top salesman Ricky approaches a potential customer in disguise and delivers a sales pitch that sounds like a poetic meditation on destiny and existence. It’s impossible to say what darkness this little masterpiece emerged from but Christian Slater (Ricky) captures all of it, abruptly and shockingly, with laser-like precision.

The moment you invite friends to some new ‘cutting-edge’ disability theatre or film, most swallow paroxysms of social anxiety. What if it’s dull? Am I allowed to yawn? What if I hate it? How interminably politically correct will it be? Do I want to think about ‘disability’ on a fun night out? While most objections can be overcome by a convincing performance, it is interesting to ask whether disability makes a difference to art, or does art transcend disability? If the current crop of plays and films, not to mention disability production companies, is anything to go by, the answer is yes to both, and we should want more of them.

Bang! A brand new theatre has opened on the South Bank managed by the two Nicks, Hytner and Starr, who ran the National for more than a decade. Located near a river crossing, their venture bears the unexciting name ‘Bridge’. If these two adopted a child, they’d call it ‘Orphanage’. Visitors approach along the Thames embankment and arrive at a soaring cliff of glass whose revolving doors usher them into a large anonymous foyer. It feels like a student union bar or a bit of an airport. Dangling from the ceiling are dozens of light bulbs, their radiance muted with tea-stained shades that cast an absolving glow over facelifts, hairpieces and liver spots.