Culture

The National Theatre’s latest show, written in 2003, has bundles of energy and ideas. A thrusting young reporter, Yvonne, investigates the shooting of a yuppie in a rundown part of a teeming US metropolis. She learns that the murder was committed by a cross-dressing gang of all-female muggers, known as AOBs, whose leader, Latisha, is a teenage genius. Her parents were alcoholic derelicts and yet she taught herself several European languages while growing up in poverty. Yvonne, who also happens to be multilingual, banters with her in Italian and German. But will Latisha confess and give the newspaper an exclusive?

Who Killed Marilyn? is a new show about an old subject. Sharleen Cooper Cohen’s play examines the circumstances surrounding Marilyn’s suspicious death in 1962. Three possible culprits emerge. The mob, the Feds and the Kennedys. Bobby and Jack were desperate to hide any trace of their romantic links with Marilyn. The mob may have rubbed her out by order of the Feds whose boss, J. Edgar Hoover, paid gangsters to conduct irregular assassinations. Hoover hated JFK, we’re told. And Marilyn kept a secret diary that might have ruined JKF’s career. But that gives Hoover a reason to protect Marilyn and to use her testimony against the Kennedys. The mob also hated JFK because he failed to oust Fidel Castro from Cuba. So they had a powerful motive to keep her alive as well.

How the Other Half Loves is the play that established Alan Ayckbourn’s name as a writer of farce. Frank and Fiona, a posh, sophisticated couple, encounter problems in their marriage when Fiona has a fling with Bob, a handsome junior at Frank’s firm. Bob’s wife, Teresa, suspects Bob of infidelity and starts to investigate his social life. An innocent couple, William and Mary, are drawn into the muddle thanks to a series of misunderstandings. The centrepiece of the elaborate plot is a pair of dinner parties on successive nights performed simultaneously on a single set. Roger Allam is as cuddly as Paddington and as caustic as Peter Cook The complications are enjoyable to watch because you have to keep adjusting the pieces in your mind to make it all fit together.

Attention spans at Edinburgh are brief. With thousands of shows on offer, the punters have to make a split-second decision based on the title and the poster. A blunt descriptive name works best, hence the popularity of Dan Kelly: How I Went to Every Supermarket in the World. Kelly spent 11 years as a data analyst collecting the prices of 164 basic items from supermarkets on every continent. The information was sold to international firms that needed to calculate the salaries of their overseas staff. Kelly, a solitary and obsessive character, liked to tour the shops with a dictaphone taped to his chest and to record the prices by muttering into the hidden microphone, like a spy. His adventures are limited to shopping centres in large cities so his observations lack surprises.

The Edinburgh Fringe is getting bigger. Last year’s total of 3,893 shows is surpassed this year by 4,206 productions. More people are coming to Edinburgh in search of fame but the pressure of numbers doesn’t guarantee quality. Rival events are treading on Scotland’s turf. London produces two festivals in August that appear to challenge Edinburgh directly. The Camden Fringe offers 450 shows covering theatre, comedy, opera and dance, while the Greenwich and Docklands International Festival stages a mix of theatre, circus and street art. The Edinburgh Fringe used to hold a unique place in the world of British entertainment as an informal talent contest where newcomers were spotted, nurtured and launched as stars.

Brainiac Live! is a ‘family science’ show based on a popular Sky TV programme. It’s ideal for children under 12 and for mums and dads who want an hour-long break from their normal parenting duties. The show is performed by a trio of lab-coated ‘brainiacs’, Ed, Ned and Raz, whose antics centre around loud bangs, naked flames, puffs of smoke and the destruction of props. The fun kicks off with a helmeted Ned preparing to dive into a sheet of cling film stretched across an empty doorframe. He runs. He leaps. He plunges through the transparent barrier which rips apart as he crash-lands on to a discarded mattress. Is that science? Not really. It’s a low-level stunt performed in conditions of extreme safety.

Plenty of critics have mocked Trainspotting – the musical (with lyrics and music by Irvine Welsh and Stephen McGuinness, respectively) but the producers know their audience’s mind. They want to see live theatre without taking the risk of a new play, which might be gruesome, and they prefer a dead-safe replica of a glamorous movie to something by Chekhov or Pinter. Reviewers admire novelty and inventiveness so they tend to punish theatre-makers who reheat leftovers. The show follows the book more closely than the film, where Renton was the central figure, and here he blends in with the community of wasters and criminals who mope around Edinburgh trying to raise cash for smack. The characters are reduced to simplistic gestures, as easy to read as hand signals. Begbie is a cocky thug.

Here Comes J. Edgar! has a brash poster featuring a cross-dressing FBI agent in fishnet tights with his thighs splayed aggressively towards the viewer. He points a warning finger as if to say, ‘Enjoy this show or go to jail.’ The abrasive imagery aligns with the arrogant tone of most LGBTQ+ advertising but the show itself has a more humane and playful temper. Harry Shearer and Tom Leopold have written a superb tragicomedy about a powerful homosexual who wants to conceal his love life while hunting down America’s most notorious criminals. We first meet Hoover as he lies in a hospital bed flanked by two chain-smoking nurses who discuss his health while filling the room with tobacco fumes. This quietly amusing scene sets the mood.

You may need to do a spot of homework before attending Tilly No-Body at the Arcola. Acted and written by Bella Merlin, the play examines the sufferings and blunders of Tilly Newes, an actress born in 1886, who married the experimental German dramatist Frank Wedekind. At first sight the show looks like a lesson for newcomers but the content is bound to confuse anyone who lacks a working knowledge of German theatre in the early 20th century. The ideal viewer is a literary expert familiar with the whole of Wedekind’s dramatic output. Numerous lines from his plays are quoted, not always with intelligible citations. ‘Women are natural actors’, runs a typical aphorism, and ‘no woman can keep a man happy by behaving sincerely.

Springwood, set in June 1939, looks at a series of tricky meetings between the American president FDR and George VI at the Roosevelts’ family retreat in upstate New York. George and Queen Elizabeth are guests at the poky old house and although they complain to each other about their sleeping quarters they hide their dismay from their hosts. The writer-director, Richard Nelson, evidently despises the main characters apart from FDR (Robert Lindsay) who comes across as a genial old buffer addicted to whisky. The dialogue is divided into easy-to-handle segments. First, we get the history bit. FDR tells George that the US ought to join Britain in the coming war but pro-German sentiment is very strong and the majority of Americans may support Hitler. Then we get the therapy bit.

Sinatra: The Musical dramatises the star’s career during a minor wobble in the early 1950s. After falling from grace, Sinatra stages a comeback and becomes an Oscar-winning film actor. Joe DiPietro’s script gives the impression that Sinatra’s world is ruled by wise, powerful and well-connected women. Billie Holiday teaches him how to sing with feeling: ‘Bend the notes at the end of the phrases.’ His mother explains the secret of a happy marriage: ‘One talks, the other doesn’t.’ When Sinatra punches and injures a photographer, his wife tries to restore his image by ordering him to play a priest in The Miracle of the Bells. Sinatra obeys. The film bombs so badly that his press agent, George, severs all contact with him.

The Old Vic presents an eccentric new version of David Mamet’s ultra-masculine play, Glengarry Glen Ross. Director Patrick Marber populates the show with middle-aged actresses. And why not? Devotees of Mamet may find it patchy but the play is so powerful that it can survive any amount of experimental tinkering. The visuals are pretty incoherent and the Old Vic’s configuration gives the cast no help at all. The playing area is surrounded by concentric rings of seats, cage-fighting style, which makes the actors feel unsure where to pitch their performance. It’s like trying to post a letter while doing a twirl on the doorstep.

Under the Shadow is a timely drama set in Tehran in 1988 during the Iran-Iraq war. Saddam’s missiles are raining down on the city which puts an additional strain on the troubled marriage of Iraj and Shideh. Iraj is a doctor. Shideh is a part-qualified doctor. During quiet spells, they chat about humdrum stuff. Iraj wants Shideh to have another baby. Shideh prefers to leap around doing her Jane Fonda exercises. Her mother-in-law potters in and out and fusses over bits of crockery. Their daughter snuggles on a sofa with a rag doll. The low-energy dialogue flits from one issue to the next without any sense of direction. The characters tell each other jokes to pass the time.

Bertolt Brecht’s classic, Mother Courage, is about a female war profiteer who drags a wagon of supplies through no man’s land and sells them to bedraggled soldiers. During the story, she loses both her children and she discovers that war is not as marvellous as she previously thought. This spiritual journey evidently mattered to Brecht, who was born in 1898 in Augsburg, and who greeted the outbreak of the first world war with enthusiasm only to become disillusioned by the mechanised slaughter of the trenches. His play is aimed at wrong-headed militaristic numbskulls who believe that war is good rather than bad. If you already hold pacifist views, you may find his tutorial a little simplistic.

End of the Rainbow feels like a prison drama set in London in 1969. Judy Garland is about to give a string of solo shows in the West End and she’s preparing at the Ritz under the supervision of her cruel boyfriend, Mickey Deans, who doubles as her publicist and drug dealer. Her British pianist, a friendly queen named Anthony, tries to protect her from Mickey’s manipulative bullying. Judy, the captive, forfeits our sympathy straight away by complaining about everything. Her suite is too poky. She’s desperate for liquor to improve her mood. And she reacts with outrage when the Ritz manager asks for payment in advance so she forces him to back down by threatening to commit suicide. She rehearses the stunt by standing on a balcony and daring herself to dive into the street.

When Rachel Reeves became Chancellor she found a lavatory in her private suite which had been used by Churchill in the 1920s. She vowed to remove it. ‘Smashing glass ceilings and urinals’ was her policy. The actor, Rosie Holt, felt inspired by Reeves’s petulance and she wrote a satire about a female politician who sets out to refit the pipes at No. 11. The Chancellor sits in her office taking phone calls from a secretary, a spin doctor and a divorce lawyer who wants her to finalise a settlement with her awkward ex-husband. Her campaign to replace the loo sparks national outrage and her office is besieged by throngs of far-right agitators. All are men. The urinal itself, played by a Churchill lookalike, becomes a personality in the play and offers advice: ‘Stand your ground.

1536, by Ava Pickett, is set in a wheatfield near Colchester during the final months of Anne Boleyn’s life. Three peasant women, Jane, Mariella and Anna, meet to discuss the latest news as it trickles in from London. When Anne is imprisoned in the Tower, they try to imagine her state of mind. ‘Terrified,’ says Mariella. ‘Furious,’ says Anna. ‘Starving,’ says Jane. After her execution, Jane shrugs, ‘She deserved it.’ The others are more sympathetic but their commentary is hard to care about because they can’t influence the events they’re discussing. Nor does Anne’s experience affect their lives in any way so their chitchat is narratively pointless. They’re far more interested in two local lads, William and Richard, who represent the extremes of male behaviour.

Please Please Me is a play about Brian Epstein whose brief and troubled life remains relatively unknown. Tom Wright’s linear script opens with the teenage Epstein enjoying secret affairs with teddy boys while working at his dad’s record shop on Merseyside. When he spotted the Beatles at the Cavern, he was smitten by their homoerotic energy rather than their music or their potential for making tons of cash. He put them in suits to soften their image while encouraging their talent for witty backchat. ‘A little pinch of naughty but family friendly,’ was his branding message. But he lacked artistic vision and he cut a lousy deal to sell plastic Beatles dolls which cost the band a fortune and angered Paul McCartney.

Grace Pervades by David Hare is a drama-documentary about the life and theatrical work of the great Victorian thesp, Sir Henry Irving. He was a morose and obsessive perfectionist whose style was considered dated even in the 19th century. Success arrived relatively late in life. He was making his way as a jobbing actor until he took the lead in an overheated French melodrama, The Bells, which turned him into a star in 1871. Ralph Fiennes delivers a dour, mirthless and deliberately stiff performance as the cranky and unapproachable actor. In drawing rooms, he shifts his feet awkwardly as if trying to find a floorboard that doesn’t creak. On stage, his mannered performances are presented as absurdities, full of grimacing, eye-rolling, jaw grinding and head tossing.

One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, adapted from Ken Kesey’s book by Dale Wasserman, is exactly like the movie but without Jack Nicholson’s star power. The cast have to impersonate lunatics for 150 minutes and they clearly love their job. Playing madmen comes naturally to actors and it’s an easy task because no creative discipline is required. Lunatics are capable of anything so the actor needn’t feel anxious about making a false move or indulging in an improbable gesture. Anything goes. The result is a hectic display of lazy, unfelt, superficial and repetitive caricatures. One actor holds a toolbox in his lap like a pet dog. Another jerks obsessively. A third leans against a pillar with his arms held out, dribbling and twitching.

A Doll’s House has been reconstructed at the Almeida with a new script by Anya Reiss. Torvald Helmer is an inept drug-addled financier who wants to sell his business to a wealthy American investor. But the deal is a dud. Without his knowledge, Torvald’s bossy wife, Nora, has stolen £860,000 from a client’s account to boost the firm’s apparent profitability and her crime is about to be disclosed by a bent accountant, Nils, who wants to blackmail her. She needs to get her hands on a small fortune fast. This cumbersome and intricate back story is explained to us during the first half which is set over the Christmas holidays in the converted cellar of Nora and Thorvald’s beautiful London home. The cellar appears to be the family nerve centre.

Copenhagen by Michael Frayn is a problem play. It debuted at the National in 1998 and ran for two years in the West End before transferring to Broadway. Since then, no UK producer has mounted a revival. Something must alarm investors. It’s a very chatty show. Three actors with three wooden chairs appear on a plain stage reciting dialogue about a meeting in Denmark in 1941 between the physicist Niels Bohr, his missus, and a family friend, Werner Heisenberg. The discussion focuses on the main developments in atomic science during the 20th century. Mrs Bohr, played by Alex Kingston, is there to offer a female angle on the ruminations of the two mega-nerds.

In The Print is a docudrama about the bitter war between Rupert Murdoch and the unions in the mid-1980s. Murdoch was determined to computerise the production of his UK titles and to terminate the far left’s stranglehold on his business. Daily papers are vulnerable to last-minute strikes and his thieving employees made no secret of their larcenous tactics. The print workers, known as ‘inkies’, earned £1,000 a week for 16 hours’ work and their union, Sogat, behaved like a bunch of racketeers. They laughed at Murdoch by submitting wage claims for employees called ‘Donald Duck’ and ‘Ronald Reagan’. Murdoch fought back with smart, imaginative tactics that Sogat, under Brenda Dean’s leadership, couldn’t handle.

Teeth ’ n’ Smiles is not quite a musical. David Hare’s 1975 play about rock’n’roll includes a handful of tunes performed by a group of failing musicians. It feels like several dramas rammed together. One strand concerns the aimless witter of instrumentalists who lounge around backstage discussing drugs and groupies. Another strand follows the lead singer, Maggie, and her destructive appetites for booze and casual sex. The third element concerns the band’s manager, Saraffian (Phil Daniels), who knows nothing about showbusiness and seems keen to advertise his ignorance to the world. Saraffian is a Dickensian figure who talks like Fagin and believes that pop stars should resemble school prefects.

Dachniki meaning ‘dacha people’ is the Russian title of the National Theatre’s new production of Gorky’s sprawling 1905 drama. Nina and Moses Raine, who adapted the play, chose the flavourless title Summerfolk which doesn’t quite capture the play’s distinctive Russian atmosphere of ennui, intellectual rumination and despair. However, their perky, supple and idiomatic dialogue works very well. Gorky appears to have written the script as a feverish homage to Chekhov, who died in 1904, and he pinched numerous characters and plot twists from his mentor. The beautiful, vain and sexually inert Varvara is a copy of Yelena in Uncle Vanya. Kaleria, the nervous actress who performs amateur verse for her friends, is inspired by Nina in The Seagull.

Neil LaBute is one of America’s most provocative and interesting playwrights. His best-known work, The Shape of Things, was made into a movie starring Rachel Weisz and Paul Rudd. America the Beautiful consists of nine plays in three chapters, the first two of which are being staged at King’s Head, the third at the Greenwich Theatre. This complex arrangement sends a signal that LaBute is a mercurial and elusive artist whose fans must chase across London to savour the full richness of his talent. The lesbian stares and leers aggressively while her victim cowers and bleats in protest The first show, Chapter 1, consists of three unconnected skits about sexual jealousy.

Interest in Dracula seems to go on for ever. Kip Williams has chosen Cynthia Erivo to star in his new version of the yarn about a clique of blood-quaffers who bite their victims’ necks and lick the seepings. The show is staged as a read-through of Bram Stoker’s text supplemented by costumes, wigs and a few orchestral hits recorded on tape. Erivo plays all 23 roles and her performance is simultaneously filmed and broadcast to the audience on TV screens dotted around the theatre. This creates two problems. First, Erivo can’t see or interact with the crowd because she’s encircled by wardrobe assistants and cameramen who swarm around her like gnats. Secondly, the audience are expected to look at the screens and not at the stage. This is odd.

Bird Grove by Alexi Kaye Campbell is a comedy of manners set in 1841. A portly suitor, Horace, arrives at a respectable house intending to propose to a rebellious and brilliant 22-year-old, Mary Ann. Horace’s father is dying and he must find a bride before nightfall or lose a substantial legacy. This ludicrous but very human situation starts the play. It’s instantly gripping. Mary Ann is in the drawing room being treated for headaches by a French mesmerist along with two wealthy radicals, Mr and Mrs Bray, who encourage her political activism. Her father, Robert, introduces his guests to each other and invites them to stay for tea. This fascinating glimpse of her early life shows George Eliot as a surly, arrogant, spoilt and heartless pest A hilariously awkward party ensues.

Shadowlands, by William Nicholson, is a solid and unsurprising account of the brief marriage between C.S. Lewis (known as Clive), and the American poet Joy Davidman. Her cancer diagnosis overshadowed their romance but they snatched a few lustful holidays together before she expired in an NHS hospital in 1960. Hugh Bonneville, as Clive, delivers his standard three-note performance – bemused decency, bumbling hesitation, ironic charm – which tells us nothing about the author’s inner life. Bonneville has succeeded in building a huge presence in the movie industry from an almost complete dearth of actorly qualities. He’s not handsome, sexy, tough, athletic, amusing, mysterious, evil or even slightly unpleasant. He’s not brilliant or stupid. He’s not admirable or despicable.