Culture

Clive Anderson’s show about Macbeth, ‘the greatest drama ever written’, offers us an hour of polished comedy loosely themed around the Scottish play. Shakespeare’s material is still topical, he says, ‘a clever Scot with a rampantly ambitious wife, like Michael Gove and Sarah Vine’. He prefers Macbeth to Hamlet which is ‘about some bloke who can’t make up his mind, like a three-and-a-half-hour interview with Jeremy Corbyn’. The act’s centrepiece is Anderson’s memory of his infamous encounter with the Bee Gees who stormed out of his TV chat show in 1996. He’d been encouraged to mock pop stars by Sting who enjoyed being teased about his stage name. ‘Sting is a minor skin-wound,’ Anderson told him.

Games for Lovers feels like a smart, sexy TV comedy. Martha is still in love with her old flame Logan whose new girlfriend has a huge libido which he can’t hope to satisfy. When Martha starts flat-hunting she answers an advert coincidentally posted by Logan’s best friend, Darren. Thus, perhaps too neatly, the two warring couples are set up for a massive falling out. Darren (played brilliantly by Billy Postlethwaite, with shades of Kevin Kline) is the beating heart of this story. He’s a former nerd who works as a City analyst and uses tricks learned from the internet to bed women. But all his techniques backfire and he becomes the victim of his botched seductions.

Equus is a psychological thriller from 1973 which opens with a revolting discovery. An unbalanced stable-lad, Alan, spends his evenings taking the horses out for an illicit gallop. Meanwhile, he’s busy seducing a hot young cowgirl at the farm but his awakening sexuality confuses him. The girl’s erotic nature brings out his closeted gay side and he tries to purge his homosexuality by stabbing six stallions in the eyes. A mopy shrink (Zubin Varla) takes on Alan’s case but finds himself investigating his own troubled psyche instead. Some of the details in Peter Shaffer’s play have dated badly. Alan’s parents are caricatures of nauseating suburban inanity.

The National Theatre’s boss, Rufus Norris, has confessed that he ‘took his eye off the ball’ when it came to female writers and he plans to strike an equal balance between the sexes in future. Good news for male scribblers who’ll know that they’ve been selected on merit but rather demoralising for females who’ll suspect that they’re just making up the numbers. Sir David Hare, who has written or adapted 25 shows for the National, could easily solve the NT’s sexual identity crisis by announcing that he’s a woman. His latest is a modern version of Ibsen’s barmy but enjoyable fable Peer Gynt, which mixes folklore, fantasy, social comment and tragicomedy.

Europe. Big word. Big theme. It was used by David Greig as the title of his 1994 play about frontiers in the age of mass migration. The setting is a railway station in eastern Europe and it opens like a kids’ TV show with each character entering and doing something ‘typical’. Everyone is either good or bad. The stationmaster is a bullying xenophobe. His deputy, Adele, is a meek, well-meaning housewife unhappily married to a dim, angry factory worker whose unemployed mates are as stupid as he is, apart from one who wants to go travelling and another who makes stacks of evil cash out of smuggling. Two migrants arrive, father and daughter. The father is a sublimely intelligent amateur philosopher with a fluffy grey beard and a habit of speaking in epigrams.

Present Laughter introduces us to a chic, louche and highly successful theatrical globetrotter, Garry Essendine, whose riotous social life is centred on his swish London apartment. This is Noël Coward’s version of Noël Coward. In the script, from 1942, Coward alleges that his alter ego is being chased by three women. The in crowd would have laughed at the reference to Coward’s secret orientation but this version rather earnestly converts one of the females into a rugged Spanish male. What for? Few scripts from the wartime era remain in the theatrical canon and one of the pleasures of seeing a vintage play is to examine the habits and conventions of a half-forgotten age.

Bitter Wheat, David Mamet’s latest play, features a loathsome Hollywood hotshot, Barney Fein, who offers to turn an actress into a superstar provided she lets him rape her. The show’s gruesome storyline has flashes of bitter comedy. Fein boasts that the Writers Guild of America would ‘drink a beaker of my mucus’ if he forced them to. Although this is the ultimate #MeToo play it can’t prevent itself from taking a masculine point of view. Fein’s assistant, Sondra (Doon Mackichan), conveniently vanishes at the right moment and leaves the starlet at the monster’s mercy. But was Sondra complicit? We aren’t told. And we learn nothing about her attitude to her boss.

Kill Climate Deniers is a provocative satire by Australian theatre-activist David Finnigan. The title sounds misanthropic and faintly deranged but the show is a comedy delivered with oodles of verve and fun. Finnigan is a skilful writer of dialogue, a gifted farceur and, at times, an astute analyst of power and its corrupting tendencies. Like most Aussies, he’s incapable of pomposity and his show takes a pop at every player in this game: the politicians, the shock jocks, the sainted Greens and the media. A TV journalist has the surname ‘Ile’ — an anagram of ‘lie’. Finnigan reminds us that the bulk of eco-warriors are white middle-class malcontents whose priority is not to save planet Earth but to get themselves noticed.

Sometimes it’s hard to describe a play without appearing to defame the writer, the performer and the theatre responsible for the production. Here’s what I saw. A semi-naked woman lurks in a corner, with her back to the audience, shaking. Rap music pounds. The woman shakes and shakes. Then she shakes a bit more. And a bit more. As her weird spasms enter their 17th uninterrupted minute, the spectators glance anxiously at their watches. Finally the woman’s twitching ceases. Speaking in a New York accent, she recites a conversation between an inquisitive child and an older girl. The theme is explicit sex chat.

Kenneth Lonergan, who wrote the movie Manchester by the Sea, shapes his work from loss, disillusionment, small-mindedness, hesitation and superficiality, all the forgettable detritus of life. The Starry Messenger is about Mark, a disappointed astronomer aged 52, who gives public lectures at a city planetarium. He loves his subject even though it let him down and every week he tackles the daft questions of his pupils with superhuman patience. The same two pests always raise their hands. One is a burly misanthrope who disbelieves all experts, the other is a high-flying oddball who craves attention. Mark starts a slow-burn affair with Angela, a single mum who needs a role model for her nine-year old son: an expert on the stars and inter-planetary travel is just the ticket.

Arts Council England takes money from almost all of us and spends it on culture for almost none of us. Among its clique of favoured writers is Ella Hickson whose work has twice been staged at the subsidised Almeida. Her first effort was a historical sketch show about oil-drilling, the second looked at the problem of elderly gropers who commission scripts from vulnerable tragediennes We have the NT to thank for her latest, Anna, a title that’s unlikely to set the pulse of theatreland racing. Viewers take their seats and are asked to don headpieces. The stage is shielded from the auditorium by a soundproof membrane of glass that stays in place during the action. Listening to the dialogue through headphones makes us feel like secret policemen monitoring a bugged apartment.

The opening of Jonathan Maitland’s new play about Boris purports to be based on real events. Just before the referendum, the Tory maverick invited some chums over to help him decide whether to opt for Leave or Remain. Mrs Johnson was present along with Michael and Sarah Gove and the Evening Standard’s owner, Evgeny Lebedev. For a bit of fun, the writer adds spectral appearances from three ex-prime ministers, Blair, Thatcher and Churchill. This is amusing at first but it slows the play down because the fantasy figures can’t affect the real-life action. There are dazzling performances here. Tim Wallers plays Evgeny as a name-dropping simpleton with naked ankles and an ultra-camp gait. Wonderful.

Colour-blind casting is a denial of history. The Young Vic’s all-black version of Death of a Salesman asks us to believe that an ordinary African-American chap living in Brooklyn in 1928 might have owned a Chevrolet, and that a black businessman in the 1940s would consider asking a friend for ten grand to purchase a ranch in Texas. Younger viewers may assume that US society has been racially integrated for nearly a century. Is that the right message? Willy Loman, the duffer at the play’s core, is one of American drama’s least attractive heroes. A preachy, devious, boastful, fawning, angry, narcissistic misery guts, he’s professionally incompetent and morally bankrupt.

Small Island, based on Andrea Levy’s novel about Jamaican migrants in Britain, feels like the world’s longest book review. We meet Hortense, a priggish school teacher, and her cool, handsome boyfriend who survive on a pittance in the Caribbean. Then we skip back to Hortense’s childhood in a house dominated by a bullying preacher who forbids conversations at mealtime. Then we cross the Atlantic to Lincolnshire and meet a chirpy blonde, Queenie, whose auntie runs a sweetie shop. Does Queenie want a job selling sweeties? Yes, says Queenie to her auntie. All this takes ages, and it feels like a deadly earnest sociology lecture. Then a stiff young bank clerk enters the shop and asks Queenie if she’d like to go for a walk. And the show takes off.

It starts on a beautiful summer’s morning in the suburbs of America. A prosperous middle-aged dad is chatting with his neighbours in the garden of his comfortable home, but by nightfall his family has been destroyed. This is one of the most momentous convulsions in all drama. Arthur Miller’s masterful plotting, which he never again surpassed, is a match for the best. By the best I mean Oedipus. Jeremy Herrin’s production emphasises the lush fertility of America in the late 1940s. Trees in full leaf overlook the timber house that is perhaps a little too small for its millionaire owner. Joe Keller is a pioneering industrialist who served a brief jail term for supplying faulty components to the air force during the war. More than 20 pilots died.

It starts at a secretarial college. The stage is occupied by a dignified elderly lady who recalls her pleasure at learning shorthand in the 1920s. She lived in Germany and she took a job at a firm headed by a man named Goldberg. He was Jewish. These unremarkable disclosures are spoken by Brunhilde Pomsel, a woman of high intellect and modest ambitions, who was born in 1911 and died two years ago, aged 106. Her life story was turned into a documentary film, which Christopher Hampton has adapted for the stage. Pomsel’s words are spoken by Dame Maggie Smith. What makes her fascinating is that she worked for Josef Goebbels and spent the entire war in the propaganda ministry in Berlin. Her acceptance of Nazism is gradual and semi-conscious.

Nigel Slater is popular because he’s an exceptionally meek cook. Not for him the sprawling restaurant empire or the transatlantic TV career to excite envy and loathing. He writes about his trade in simple vivid prose and his bestselling memoir, Toast, has become a play. Young Nigel enters as a 1960s schoolboy, with shorts and a side parting, living in a posh suburb of Wolverhampton. Dad is a kindly but remote presence, an alien in his own home. Mum is a braindead kitchen-limpet who encourages Nigel’s first culinary experiments. The family are adventurous. They try spaghetti bolognese. Dad takes charge at the dinner table and loads each plate with a heap of yellow string topped by garnish the colour of lava spewed from a volcano. Nigel pronounces the dish quite good.

Caryl Churchill’s best-known play, Top Girls, owes a large debt to 1970s TV comedy. It opens with a Pythonesque dinner party in which noted female figures from myth and history get drunk while swapping gags and stories. We meet a Victorian explorer, an emperor’s concubine, a 16th-century Flemish battle-axe and a long-suffering Italian peasant girl. The scene has no internal logic or dramatic direction and, just like a Python routine, it’s besotted with its own inventiveness and it relies on erudite banter and verbal shocks to sustain our interest.

The Phlebotomist by Ella Road explores the future of genetics. Suppose a simple blood test were able to tell us how long we will live and what disease will kill us. If the tests were compulsory and the results publicly available, a new hierarchy based on life expectancy would emerge. Citizens facing chronic illness or early death would struggle to find jobs and spouses. The scientists who administer the tests would come under pressure to falsify the results. And alpha citizens with high-grade DNA would be murdered, and their blood harvested to create fake genetic identities. This gruesome, ingenious and all-too-believable scenario is presented through a squeaky-clean romance between two young lovebirds.

Bruce Norris is a firefighter among dramatists. He runs towards danger while others sprint in the other direction. His Pulitzer-winning hit Clybourne Park studied ethnic bigotry among American yuppies and it culminated in a gruesomely funny scene in which smug liberals exchange racist jokes in public. The play was morally complex, dramatically satisfying and an absolute hoot to watch. His new show, Downstate, co-commissioned by the NT and Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, takes on a far crunchier topic than racism. Child sex abuse. We’re in a residential home occupied by a quartet of tagged offenders monitored by a sharp-tongued probation officer. We meet the molesters. Fred was once a music teacher who thought it was OK to seduce the boys perched on his piano stool.

No menace, no Venice. This new production of Pinter’s Betrayal is set on a bare stage with scant regard for the play’s physical requirements. The script specifies a handful of furnished locations: a pub, a study, a flat, a hotel bedroom, a living room. But instead we get an off-white void where three youngish actors prowl in circles, ogling each other. This is Pinter’s finest work, a tense romantic tragedy with flashes of comic fireworks, and it differs from the rest of his output by revealing its themes directly to the audience, by delivering an intelligible plot full of suspense and surprises, by focusing relentlessly on the human duel at its core, and by never relapsing into obscurities or screeds of reminiscence spoken by dotty vagabonds.