Culture

It starts with a brilliant joke. We’re in the Weimar Republic in 1929. Little Emil Tischbein is listening to his mother and a moaning neighbour, Mrs Wirth, lamenting Germany’s loss of moral fibre. Mrs Wirth cites a recent gangster film whose depravity shocked her to the core. ‘We saw it three times,’ she adds.  Forewarned about thieves and hoodlums, Emil travels to Berlin carrying a precious cargo of 140 marks. A sinister stranger robs him on the train and he befriends a gang of Berlin school-kids who set off to retrieve his cash. Erich Kästner’s classic is directed with great style by Bijan Sheibani, who captures much of the book’s verve and atmosphere.

Henry V is the final show in Michael Grandage’s first West End season. The theatre was full to bursting on press night. Jude Law, in the title role, had attracted a crowd of autograph hunters, who shivered outside the stage door. One was a tall, chubby young man in loose grey clothes wearing a bobble hat and a very kindly grin. His flies were undone. The play itself is a disjointed, rambling affair. Poorly shaped, and even a little artless, it’s crowded with fights, bloodshed and laddish humour. The scenes of brutality are offset by soaring passages of patriotic verse that have been quoted into overfamiliarity. There was much coughing and guttural distraction throughout the performance. Grandage aims for handsome, elegant informality and here he scores full marks.

In 1992 Quentin Tarentino gave us Reservoir Dogs. At a stroke he reinvented the gangster genre and turned it into a comedy of manners with a deadly undertow. This new mutation looked as if it might be easy to copy. Many tried. Among them was Jez Butterworth, whose 1995 play Mojo takes Tarantino’s zany-macabre format and moves it to Soho in the 1950s. Butterworth also leans heavily on Pinter. The play opens in the back-office of a nightclub. Two pilled-up criminals are exchanging streams of lairy London chit-chat. Their boss, Ezra, has discovered a teenage heart-throb named Silver Johnny but rival gangsters are keen to muscle in and grab a piece of the star’s income. The details are hard to follow because the jabbering thugs leap so fast from one topic to the next.

Ben Miller is wolfing down a pizza. I meet the comedian in a Cambridge restaurant where he demolishes a Margherita shortly before racing off to appear on stage in The Duck House, a new farce about corrupt MPs. The show is set in 2009. Miller stars as a Labour backbencher who wants to jump ship and join the Conservatives. But first he has to convince a Tory bigwig that his expenses claims are entirely legitimate. He’s not helped by his dim-witted wife, his corrupt Russian cleaner, and his anarchist son, Seb, who has sublet the family flat in Kensington to a suicidal Goth. The writers Dan Patterson and Colin Swash wanted to stage the play just before the 2010 election. Miller believes this would have been premature.

Athol Fugard is regarded as a theatrical titan but I usually need a microscope to find any trace of greatness in his work. The Island is set in a South African prison camp in the 1960s. Two banged-up lags, John and Winston, are toiling in the noonday heat. The governor torments them with a Kafka-esque prank. They’re placed at opposite ends of a sandpit and given shovels and wheelbarrows. Each must amass a dune of gravel, which his colleague is forced to deplete. This backbreaking futility is supposed to grind their spirits into nothing. It fails. Released from punishment at sundown, they retreat to their cells where they express themselves with abandon. They amuse each other with frolicsome monologues. They swap reminiscences about good old chums from home.

‘I am walking in some mountains’. That’s the out-of-office that pops up when I email Johnny Flynn to request an interview. The folk star and West End actor is on holiday. But he’s not doing the Three Peaks Challenge. No, he’s tracing St Paul’s third missionary journey across southern Turkey, a 30th birthday present from Bea, his wife and teenage sweetheart. ‘I’m obsessed with pilgrimages,’ Flynn says. He’s also done the Way of St James, which finishes in Santiago de Compostela. ‘I love following old routes, imagining the consciousness of those who walked them.’ When he’s come down from the mountains we sit down to talk about the recent release of his third album, Country Mile.

Here’s a tip for play-goers. When the curtain goes up on a garden, prepare for some feeble plotting. The glory of gardens, for the playwright, is that the characters can enter and leave without reason. The rites of welcome and valediction, the physical opening and shutting of doors, the declaration of motive are all abandoned. Anyone can wander in and out of a backyard. But that freedom of action is denied to a character who enters, say, a palace or a travel agents or a bedroom. Shaw is fond of gardens. Ayckbourn quite likes them too. Shakespeare used them more than once (but he’s forgiven) and David Storey sets his 1970 classic Home in a garden where two elderly bores bump into each other on a warm autumn day. They seem to be acquainted.

Gregory Doran, now in command at Stratford in succession to Sir Michael Boyd, launches his regime with Richard II, intending to stage the complete Shakespearean canon over the next six years, ‘making every play an event’. What’s really good is that the plays will also be seen on tour, in London, online and ‘live on screen in cinemas and classrooms nationwide’. It’s taken too long for the publically funded RSC to put live ‘streaming’ in place; Richard II, broadcast on 13 November, will be the first play so honoured. With David Tennant in the title role this may already be a sell-out, but encore screenings are already planned in many cinemas.

There are many pleasures in The Light Princess, a new musical by Tori Amos. George MacDonald’s fairy story introduces us to a beautiful red-haired royal, Althea (Rosalie Craig), who has a mysterious resistance to gravity. After various tribulations she abandons life on dry land and becomes a mermaid. The show meets these technical challenges with some brilliance. Althea seems to float mysteriously across the stage in midair while being supported on the limbs of black-clad gymnasts. Later she moves to a lake, which is suggested by intricate layers of shimmering blue cloth. But despite the sumptuous and ingenious special effects, the show hasn’t a powerful enough storyline or sufficient character interest to become a hit. The engine-room is absent.

Bang! The race is on. James Graham is the celebrated author of This House, a superb examination of Labour’s administrative bellyflops during the 1970s, which premièred at the National last year. Some time ago, Graham was asked to update his 2008 play, Tory Boyz, about homosexuality in the Conservative party. Over the same period, the Tories have been furiously updating themselves. Who will embrace the future first? Graham’s play is a blend of then and now. He imagines an openly gay youngster working in the Tory policy unit, and he compares his experience with Ted Heath’s career in the 1950s. (That Heath was gay is taken for granted.) But the sprint is over before it’s even begun.

A feast of pleasures, and some annoyances, at the Trike. Handbagged, by Moira Buffini, is a fictional account of the weekly audiences between Mrs Thatcher and the Queen. The staging is extremely odd. Buffini gives monarch and prime minister two impersonators each. This enables us to trace the minor developments in hair colour and frock choice between 1979 and 1990. But also encourages the pairs of actors to outdo each other. Here are the results. Marion Bailey plays the older Queen as an unbudgeable human lighthouse. The facial gestures are beautifully done and Bailey gets that stoical out-thrust lip pout that has become the Queen’s signature grimace in recent years.

Brecht in the West End? Quite a rarity. Jonathan Church’s zippy and stylish version of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui arrives from the Chichester Festival garlanded with plaudits. Brecht’s wartime allegory was intended as a warning to America that its idolisation of gangsters made it vulnerable to a fascist takeover. Ui begins as a petty criminal mocked by Chicago’s established hoodlums. To revive his fortunes, he orders his thugs to vandalise grocery shops and to extract protection money from their owners. This brings him into conflict with Chicago’s mighty Cauliflower Trust. A huge warehouse belonging to a leading merchant is burned to the ground and Ui orchestrates a show trial that enables him to abolish the civil authority and seize control of the city.

How appropriate. Barking in Essex, a farce about gangsters, has been dishonestly billed as ‘a new comedy’. The script was written in 2005 by Clive Exton (1930–2007), who pre-dates Woody Allen by half a decade. The storyline — thieves quarrel over stolen loot — is a trusty antique featured in ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’ and in Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. The plot moves fast. We open in a monstrously tacky mansion where a criminal matriarch, Emmie Packer, is in a flap. She’s just informed her son Darnley, and his wife, Chrissie, that she’s blown three million quid from a bank heist and the robber is on his way to claim the loot. Run for it! A pretty young lawyer, Allegra, arrives.

Terry Johnson’s acclaimed farce Hysteria opens in Sigmund Freud’s Hampstead home in 1938. The godfather of psychobabble is ambushed by a beautiful maniac named Jessica, who forces him to analyse her, and then hides in his closet and strips naked. Along comes Freud’s old chum Yahuda, a bumbling twerp who doubles as the farce’s authority figure. His presence forces Freud to improvise countless daft wheezes in order to prevent Jessica from being discovered. You may wonder if Freud is the best candidate to star in this kind of sex caper. And you’d be right. He is, in fact, the worst candidate.

Suddenly they’re all at it. Actors, that is, writing plays. David Haig, Rory Kinnear and Simon Paisley Day are all poised to offer new dramas to the public. But someone else has got there first. You may have spotted Phoebe Waller-Bridge playing a secretarial cameo in The Iron Lady. She’s a rangy Home Countries brunette with rosy lips, large inviting eyes and an angular, forthright face that suggests intelligence, amusement and a hint of subversive sexual power. Her immaculate skin is as white as a snowdrop. All in all, she’s perfectly set up for a steady career in frocks and pearls playing Downton gold-diggers and hyperventilating Jane Austen virgins. But she seems to want more, something wilder, something weirder, from her profession.

Chimerica. The weird title of Lucy Kirkwood’s hit play conjoins the names of the eastern and western superpowers and promises to offer a snapshot of both nations just as the baton of economic primacy passes from America’s wizened youth to China’s reborn antiquity. The script has an unusually complex set of creative ambitions. It takes the formula of the romantic comedy, gives it a bittersweet twist, and plants it in the arid terrain of international politics. And it starts as a whodunnit. Joe Schofield, a fêted American photo-journalist, was in Tiananmen Square in 1989 when he shot a few frames of the unknown citizen who halted a Chinese tank in its tracks. Scroll forward 23 years and Joe believes Tank Man is living undercover in America.

Politics is everywhere in Edinburgh. It’s embedded in the architecture of the streets. The New Town, built in the latter half of the 18th century, is a granite endorsement of the Act of Union, a stone pledge of loyalty to Britain’s new Germanic monarchy in London. The layout forms an oblong grid. The horizontals of George Street, Princes Street and Queen Street intersect at right angles with Charlotte Street and Hanover Street. This makes the approximate proportions of a flag. There are rumours that a scheme was proposed to dig two diagonal avenues, meeting in a central X, which would have turned the New Town into a colour-free Union Jack. My hunch is that this is a fantasy dreamed up retrospectively by ingenious nationalists.

This is brilliant. The new play by Oliver Cotton, a 69-year-old actor, is set in New York in 1986. An ageing couple, Joe and Ellie, are practising their ballroom dancing when Joe’s maverick brother Billy comes crashing through the front door. The cops are after him. He was holed up in a Florida hotel when he spotted the Nazi brute who tortured them all at a death-camp during the war. He shot the bastard dead and left him floating in a swimming pool in front of hundreds of gawping witnesses. Then he ran for it. He’s not even sorry. He’s pleased he did it. This is gripping stuff. What next? A hundred options blaze through the mind, not least the possibility that Billy has mistakenly slotted an innocent lookalike. But Cotton fails to elaborate on his marvellous opening.