Theatre

When I was a kid, I was taught by a kindly old Jesuit whose youth had been beguiled by George Bernard Shaw. The provocative ironies of ‘GBS’ were quoted everywhere and he was, for several decades, the world’s leading public intellectual. But as a schoolboy I found it hard to assent to the infatuations of my elders and though I relished Shaw’s aphorisms (‘we learn from history that we learn nothing from history’) I conceived a suspicion that he was smug and overrated. A babbler. Perhaps even a bore. Man and Superman, rarely revived at full length, offers us GBS with all the taps running. Imagine Fry, Brand and Norton rolled into one and given a bushel of coke to snort.

Torben Betts is much admired by his near-namesake Quentin Letts for socking it to London trendies. Letts is one of the few individuals who enjoys the twin blessings of a Critics’ Circle membership card and a functioning brain so his views deserve serious attention. The title of Betts’s 2012 play Muswell Hill shifts its target into the cross hairs with no subtlety whatsoever. Curtain up. Married couple, Jess and Mat, are nervily tidying their yuppie dream home in expectation of supper guests. Jess is a sex-bomb accountant. Mat is a blankly handsome scribbler whose debut novel keeps getting rejected. Then a missile strikes. Mat casually mentions his acquaintanceship with an Australian electrician whom Jess has been secretly entertaining. Tense silence. The doorbell rings.

‘We hate the system and we want the system to pay us to say we hate the system.’ The oratorio of subsidised theatre rises, in triumphant blast, at the Royal Court whose current empress Vicky Featherstone has chosen to direct an interesting new play by Zinnie Harris. I’d call it a quasi-symbolist extraterrestrial tragicomic chicklit road-movie spoof with Chomsky-esque anti-corporate neo-collectivist socioeconomic textual underpinning but I fear this may lend it a clarity of purpose, and a firmness of character, which it doesn’t quite possess. We start with Dana, a chippy frump on the last lap of her sex life, bedding a UN drudge named Jarron who claims to be ‘a demon, a devil, a god’.

Big event. A new play from Sir Tom. And he tackles one of philosophy’s oldest and crunchiest issues, which varsity thinkers call ‘the hard problem’. How is it that a wrinkled three-pound blancmange sitting at the top of the spinal cord can generate abstract thoughts of almost limitless complexity? In real life Sir Tom is said to have such a flair for philosophical chitchat that he can fire off searching observations about Descartes, mind-body dualism, the nature of immateriality, being and non-being, the ‘cogito’ and so on, until those around him have slithered into a coma. Which is not rude of them.

Gay plays crowd the theatrical canon. There are the necessary enigmas of Noël Coward, like The Vortex or Design For Living, which are slyly aimed at an audience of knowing code-breakers. There are the proud, defiant (and rather tedious) pleas for understanding like La Cage Aux Folles. And the gayest of them all, My Night With Reg, is also the least overtly gay because it dispenses with all homosexual caricatures. There isn’t an interior designer, a flight steward or a hair stylist in sight, let alone a Liberace fetishist, or a Maria Callas wonk. The characters are mainstream yuppies who are exactly like hetero folk, except that they seduce one another with very little encouragement and an enviably high success rate. We’re in the 1980s.

A knockout show at the Young Vic. Literally. The stage has been reconfigured as a boxing ring to make Mike Bartlett’s play, Bull, feel like a sporting fixture. This is a common conceit, even a cliché, but here it’s done superbly. The auditorium floor is squash-club yellow and the stage is surrounded by a casual standing area that creates the ragged informal atmosphere of a training arena. Excellent stuff. The play is a wordy, tricky, shifty, nasty, faithless thing. The characters lie about their backgrounds so it’s hard to know who, or what, to latch on to. More problematically the plot is infertile. Nothing grows or develops. At curtain-fall the position is the same as at curtain-rise. We’re in a workplace.

A new year must start with hope and resolution, and if you’re very rich, with influence in the highest places, I’d urge you to resolve to dust off the private jet and get to Paris quick this weekend hoping to find a ticket somehow for the last Châtelet performances of An American in Paris, Christopher Wheeldon’s s’wonderful, s’marvellous new staging of the Gershwin/Minnelli musical film. Or book for New York in March when the show moves to its second home on Broadway. But surely there must be a UK run soon. It’s the first big dance-musical of the Royal Ballet’s favourite son, which is why we should pay attention. The secret of Christopher Wheeldon’s current status at 41 as blue-eyed boy of the Western ballet world is his geniality.

1. The play of the year, by a mile, was Fathers and Sons at the Donmar adapted from Turgenev’s novel. Lindsey Turner directed Brian Friel’s harrowing and exhilarating script with immense visual aplomb. 2. Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be Lionel Bart’s first musical was a sublimely witty look at the Cockney underworld starring Gary Kemp. 3. The Realness A new song-and-dance comedy at Hackney Downs Studio, approached the same material as Fings but with a punchier and more contemporary style. 4. I Can't Sing! The exhilarating title melody of this musical set my nape tingling with static electricity and I was convinced that Harry Hill’s X-Factor spoof would stick around for years. It lasted a matter of weeks. 5.

Janet Suzman’s throwaway comment about the theatre being 'a white invention' has attracted a storm of opportunistic derision. What Dame Janet may have meant was this. Theatre is gossip ceremonially presented. And the dramatic structures devised by the Athenians in the 5th century BC raised the form to such a pitch of excellence that the offspring cultures of Ancient Greece acquired a head start that has never been relinquished. A harmless footnote. But her timing was unlucky. A day earlier the head of Arts Council England, Peter Bazalgette, ordered the 670 arts bodies he supports to get their skates on and make a bigger push for ‘diversity’.

A couple of nights ago a question arose in our post-show discussion. It is a question I am familiar with. I run Theatre Uncut. We commission writers to create short plays that explore social or political issues. We then release these plays, rights free, to be performed by anyone anywhere for a limited period and stage them in leading theatres across the country. So far this year 328 groups in 25 countries have downloaded the plays. While we don’t advertise our own political persuasion it is pretty obvious to which side we lean: we were set up in response to the cuts. We use the word ‘social’ believing that society very much exists. We give plays to other makers rights free. So the question that arose is what we often get asked: what about right-wing voices?