Culture

West End producers are itching to get their hands on the new show at the Bush. Mama Mia’s director, Phyllida Lloyd, takes charge of a script written by the Torchwood actress Cush Jumbo about the world’s first black female celebrity. Josephine Baker was born to wow the crowds. A child cabaret artiste from St Louis, she performed as a chorus girl in New York and then leapt the Atlantic to become the toast of Paris in the 1920s. Aged 19, she was one of the biggest theatrical stars in Europe. She married an Italian count, adopted 12 children, bought a château, went bankrupt, fought for the Resistance during the war, returned to America in the 1950s and became a heroine of the civil rights movement. Cush Jumbo brings a formidable range of skills to the role.

The Ladykillers is back. Sean Foley’s adaptation of the classic Ealing comedy introduces us to a crew of villains who stage a train heist while lodging in the house of a sweet old lady. She discovers their crime and when they try to bump her off she proves indestructible. The 1955 movie makes a huge effort to manage the plot’s credibility. The audience is never quite sure if this is a criminal gang in a comic predicament or comic gang in a criminal one. Sean Foley abjures such nuances and gives us a bunch of clowns in a two-hour slapstick routine. This approach deprives the tale of all its subtlety and shadowy strangeness. Michael Taylor’s complex, expressionist design adds to the sense of artifice. A cast of celebs compete to get the most laughs.

It’s always a problem with Macbeth: what accents to use? The Globe is applying the traditional remedy. Lord and Lady Macbeth come from Epsom. Everyone else comes from Glasgow. This is a highly entertaining production — one of the best at the Globe in recent years — but it’s not entirely perfect. Joseph Millson has pretty much everything you need to play Macbeth, good looks, physical stature, a soldierly bearing and a dash of melancholy. But he has something you don’t need at all. A gift for laughter. He’s such an instinctive comedian that he sends the audience into fits, without noticing it, by accident almost. And in the oddest places, too. Macduff and Lennox arrive at the castle where Duncan lies murdered.

Dominic Cooke did it at the Royal Court. Now Ed Hall is having crack as well. Cooke’s crazy decision to place his theatre at the disposal of young scribblers prompted the emergence of several brilliant new female playwrights, some barely out of their teens. Ed Hall, following suit, has brought a play by newcomer Melanie Spencer into the Hampstead’s studio space downstairs. Responsible Other is a relationship drama set in Northampton. Teenage Daisy has just lost her mum to cancer. And she’s afflicted by a rare condition, lupus, which damages the organs and prevents sufferers from venturing outdoors. Her best mate Alice tries to cheer her up with newsflashes from the classroom and romantic chitchat about fit young shelf-stackers at Sainsbury’s.

Good and bad at the National. The Amen Corner by James Baldwin is a wryly observed comedy drama written for a studio theatre. It’s an excellent small play. The director Rufus Norris pumps it full of steroids and tries to turn it into a great American epic like Streetcar or The Crucible. His staging suggests the finale of a country-house opera festival. Costly baggage impedes the script’s sprightly flow. On-stage jazzmen snivel through trombones and hack at double basses. Preening choirs warble and sway. Spare actors hang out of windows trying to look cool and indolent. The running time reaches a Napoleonic 155 minutes. Megalomania infects the furniture too. Baldwin asked for two cheap sets, a ramshackle kitchen and a dingy meeting-room.

First the good news. Strange Interlude by Eugene O’Neill has been cut down from five hours to just under three and a half. The action, if you can call it that, begins at 7 p.m. but if you reach the Lyttelton theatre at the more civilised hour of 8 you’ll have missed very little. The first act could be disposed of in six words, ‘my fiancé died in the war’, but O’Neill is such a colossal twaddler that he wastes absolutely ages gabbling on about this and that before plunging into his story. The main character, Nina, is a bourgeois flapper who approaches life in a spirit of cynical pragmatism. In the middle of Act II (at roughly 8.10 p.m., in real time), she marries an impotent jerk whose bloodline turns out to be infested with lunacy.

Mamet is back. His 2009 play Race is an offbeat courtroom drama set entirely in a lawyers’ office before the trial begins. Jack and Henry are two hotshot attorneys, one white, one black, who must decide whether to accept the case of a prosperous banker, Charles, accused of raping a black woman in a hotel. Jack and Henry have a young black trainee, Susan, whose ethnicity and gender may help them sway the jury. The case against Charles turns on sequins. The victim swears that her dress was torn off during the attack but a hotel cleaner found no sequins on the floor. Sequinned attire is naturally deciduous, or, as Jack puts it, ‘a sequined dress, you look at it wrong, they start to fall off’.

A marvellous novelty at the Tower of London. The Banqueting Suite of the New Armouries has been converted into a pop-up theatre and the Tower authorities have welcomed a new play following the rise and fall (into two pieces) of Anne Boleyn. Joanna Carrick, who directs her own script, has chosen a tricky format. Two characters, Anne and her brother George, tell the story of Anne’s fatal marriage to Henry VIII. Even Aeschylus found this ancient format rather constricting and introduced a third character. Perhaps Carrick knows better. Anne and George are evidently attracted to each other and they romp around a four-poster bed exchanging gossip in fits of giggles. At first the characterisation is a little thin. Then it gets thinner.

The Weir is the ultimate hit-from-nowhere. It was written in 1997 by the 26-year-old Conor McPherson. It opened at the Royal Court Upstairs and glided over to Broadway and then toured America. The script defies every rule of theatrical physics. It’s wordy and static, it’s entirely devoid of action or spectacle, and the atmosphere is mired in gloom. Four morose drinkers, stuck in a pub in the west of Ireland, try to impress a pretty incomer from Dublin by telling her ghost stories. Nothing else happens. The faint stirring of a romance between the Dublin girl and the handsome deadbeat behind the bar provides a tiny note of optimism at the end. And yet McPherson is a miracle-worker.

They’re back. Howard Davies and his translator Andrew Upton had a well-deserved hit in 2007 with Gorky’s Philistines at the Lyttelton. Children of the Sun, which Gorky wrote in jail in 1905, is a prophetic allegory that foretells the destruction of Russia’s weak, idle and pretentious upper classes. We’re in a country mansion where a mad professor, stuck in his laboratory, conducts daft experiments while rhapsodising about the redeeming power of science. He stands for the tsar, I think. Around him clusters a gang of artists and drifters who settle into a quadrangle of doomed eroticism. This one loves this one but that one loves this one who loves someone else, and so on. Each is too self-involved to respond to a romantic overture.

A lap of honour at the Royal Court. Bruce Norris has been one of the big discoveries of artistic director Dominic Cooke, who takes his bow by directing The Low Road. Norris’s greatest hit, Clybourne Park, was a savage and illuminating satire about racism. His next trick is to examine the burning issue of the day, unfettered greed. A great start. But he can’t decide whether he’s for or against the profit motive. And he has no idea where to mount his attack. He time-travels to 18th-century America and imagines an unscrupulous spiv, a bit like Barry Lyndon, who climbs from destitution to wealth and whose life touches American history at various crucial moments.

In his ‘Love Song’, T.S. Eliot’s ageing bank-clerk J. Alfred Prufrock protests he isn’t ‘Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be...’. David Farr’s new production sets out to put this to rights. The result is indeed a very strange affair. It is built around Jonathan Slinger, who last season starred memorably as Prospero in The Tempest and as Lenny in Pinter’s The Homecoming. A little further back he’s been Macbeth in a curiously Popish staging by Michael Boyd and Richards II and III in Boyd’s great Histories sequence. A less Eliotian conceit is the director’s notion that Hamlet is about sword fighting or, in this modern-dress interpretation, specifically fencing.

Impossible, surely. The Book of Mormon could never live up to the accolades lavished on it by America’s critics. ‘Blissfully original, outspoken, irreverent and hilarious,’ was a typical review. The three authors are formidably gifted. Trey Parker and Matt Stone gave us South Park, while Robert Lopez is the co-writer of Avenue Q. As a fan of both shows, I was fearful that Mormon would turn out to be as much fun as underwater paintballing. So, up goes the curtain. A posse of geeky Yanks in crisp white shirts are being dispatched to Mormon missions around the world. We focus on two characters, a big handsome jock and a fat needy blob. Their destination is revealed: Uganda. Everyone is shocked and sad.

Study the greats. That’s the advice to all budding playwrights. And there are few contemporary dramatists more worthy of appreciative scrutiny than Bruce Norris, whose savage and hilarious comedy, Clybourne Park, bagged the Pulitzer Prize in America before transferring to the West End where it stunned audiences with its macabre revelations about bourgeois attitudes to racism. But an apprentice writer analysing such an accomplished work will probably be overawed by its self-confidence and polish. Far more interesting to study Norris in an earlier phase of his development. Purple Heart, from 2003, was the first of his plays to be performed outside the United States. The date is 1972. The setting is a crummy house in the Midwest occupied by a trio of trailer-park losers.

Peter Morgan has extracted more cash from the royal ‘brand’ than the Buckingham Palace giftshop. He’s at it again with The Audience, a fictional dramatisation of the weekly conversations between the Queen and her first ministers. This is a smart idea carried off with intelligence and plenty of style. Morgan dispenses with a linear parade of PMs and leaps to and fro across the decades. A youthful Harold Wilson bustles in full of self-confidence and jokes. The Queen takes to him immediately. Barely ten years later, the Yorkshireman has dwindled into a broken figure and his legendary memory is fading fast. But as he shrinks, the bond of affection between himself and the monarch grows. It’s one of the play’s few attempts at emotional depth.

It’s been a while, I have to say, but last week I saw a show that thrilled me to the core. Trelawny of the Wells, the Donmar’s latest offering, is a tribute to the theatre written by actor-turned-writer Arthur Wing Pinero. A simple set-up. Gorgeous young luvvie, Rose Trelawny, has forsaken the greasepaint to marry a greaseball called Arthur Gower. He’s loaded. Rosie’s actor chums treat her to a farewell bash complete with antique gags, tuneless ditties, snatches from half-remembered dramas and long-winded orations consisting entirely of in-jokes. (You’ll have spotted that this is not the show that thrilled me to the core.

Who got the most out of the credit crunch? Security guards, repossession firms, bailed-out banks and, of course, playwrights. Anders Lustgarten is the latest to cash in on five years of global misery with If You Don’t Let Us Dream, We Won’t Let You Sleep. The play, like the title, is effortful, disjointed and cumbersome. In the first half, a gang of fatcat bankers sets up a new financial instrument, Unity Bonds, which will generate profits from socially useful behaviour. This intriguing idea is sidelined in the second half. The action moves to a squatter camp where the banking system is about to be put on trial. Lustgarten assumes, no doubt correctly, that the audience is more in sympathy with anti-capitalists than with high finance.