Culture

Pinero’s comedy The Magistrate is a marvellous confection of shameful secrets and multiplying concealments. Agatha, a beautiful widow of 36, has trimmed five years from her age in order to bag her second husband, Aeneas Posket, an agreeably pompous magistrate. Her subterfuge is imperilled by her 19-year-old son who must pretend to be 14 in order to make the maths work. To please his mother, the young buck behaves like a child at home. But elsewhere he pleases himself. He keeps a private room at the racy Hotel des Princes in town. One evening, he persuades his weakling stepfather to accompany him for a night of drunken antics. The police swoop on the hotel and Posket has to run pell-mell from the officers of the law.

Are we barmy or what? Our mawkish obsession with the first world war demonstrates that we’re in the grip of a mass delusion: institutional sentimentality. The latest symptom of our death-mania is Nick Dear’s engaging play about the pastoral poet Edward Thomas, who was killed in action in 1917. Thomas began writing verse aged 36 at the suggestion of his American chum Robert Frost. We first meet the pair in a West Country croft in 1914. Frost is a smug, wily and sententious trustafarian who likes the idea of tilling the earth but stops short of actually tilling it himself. Thomas, a suicidal depressive, is incapable of showing warmth to his wife, Helen, and his three squealing nippers.

Where have you been all my life, Orphan of Zhao? Come to think of it, where has any Chinese theatre been? Bang up to the minute, the RSC’s new artistic director, Gregory Doran, launched his regime with the so-called (actually, badly called) ‘Chinese Hamlet’ on the very day that President Hu Jintao, dwarfed by a 20ft hammer and sickle, prepared to hand over control to Xi Jinping. As the Orphan is about successful resistance to the misuse of power, Xi Jinping will need to pay good attention. In truth, the Orphan is a deeply interesting play with a history running back over two millennia.

Uncle Vanya comes into the Vaudeville at an artful slouch. Lindsay Posner’s take on Chekhov’s story of bickering Russian sophisticates has an unusual visual style. In Britain we’re used to seeing Chekhov set in some fading Palladian mansion just outside Haslemere or Bath. Designer Christopher Oram has rummaged through the archives and discovered some hideously authentic stylings. He offers us a gloomy Siberian dacha, all cobwebby nooks and stacked timbers painted cowpat brown and carved with ornamental Asiatic doodles. This hulking coffin of a house emphasises the isolation and pinched misery of the play. The starry cast shine with fitful brilliance.

Martina Cole is a rarity among novelists. Her work is set in the ugly, male-dominated world of London’s criminal fraternity and yet nearly all her fans are women. Blonde women, in particular, as I found out when I took my seat in the Theatre Royal Stratford East to see Patrick Prior’s adaptation of her breakthrough novel, Dangerous Lady. In a great sea of peroxide hairdos, my coiffure was the only point of darkness. Cole’s novel starts with a gem of an idea. She takes the brutal mythology of the Kray twins and softens it with a dash of femininity. Her criminal gangsters have a sister. The Ryans are a family of Irish Catholics dominated by a ruthless matriarch, Sarah.

Wow. This is a turn-up. Politicians and actors rarely see eye-to-eye. Thesps regard Westminster as sordid, petty, corrupt and corrupting. Politicians, for their part, like to dismiss the theatre as pretentious, irrelevant and fake. So here’s a play that brings them together. This House, written by James Graham, and directed by Jeremy Herrin, is a triumph on many levels. It takes the most squalid and depressing era in recent political history —1974–1979 — and turns it into a frothy and hilarious melodrama. James Graham’s inspirational idea is to use Labour’s fragile majority as his sole dramatic motor.

High ambitions at the Donmar. Artistic supremo Josie Rourke has chosen to direct one of Racine’s more impenetrable dramas, Berenice. The play introduces us to the emperor Titus, a besotted weakling, and his lover, Queen Berenice, an ageing sexpot from Palestine. Berenice wants to become Titus’s official squeeze but the xenophobic Romans don’t care for asylum-seeking adventuresses seducing their rulers. So Titus sends Berenice packing. She’s reluctant to go and she hangs around while her ex-lover, Antiochus, hovers in the wings awaiting developments. This is the position at the start of the play and, 90 minutes later, not much has happened although a lot of feelings have been discussed in wordy speeches. Racine writes like a corporate lawyer.

I’ve just come back from India. At least that’s how it feels after a double attack of subcontinental drama. Tara Arts, in Wandsworth, has relocated Molière’s The Miser to modern India and commissioned a script from the Glaswegian standup, Hardeep Singh Kohli. He brings the two cultures together with the insouciant aplomb of an experimental chef concocting a lobster and peppercorn fruit sundae. The result may not please hardcore Molière fans, who speak in reverential tones of the master’s subtlety and elegance, his satirical adroitness and his talent for intricate and charming narrative constructions. This is a show that confidently abandons all such sophistication. It aims for low-brow burlesque. And it scores a direct hit.

The tone is the thing. Ibsen is among the heaviest of the heavy-going playwrights and his masterpiece, Hedda Gabler, is an unbearably tense psychological thriller that ends with one of the biggest shocks in the theatrical repertoire. The play takes us into a doomed marriage between Hedda, a brilliant and eccentric depressive, and George Tesman, a dull-as cheesecake university lecturer. Director Anna Mackmin has read the Old Vic audience correctly. They’ve spent all day at the office, raising enough funds to buy tickets, and they’re not interested in a three-hour Nordic brain-bruiser. Instead, they want a frothy, offbeat marital comedy with a few sad bits. And that’s what they get.

Richard III is seriously bad for your health. Any actor will tell you that the part of the ‘bunch-backed toad’ is so physically punishing that the chap in the title role usually ends up being injected with painkillers by the local quack before each show. Or he finds himself in hospital when he should be on stage. Mark Rylance has heeded these warnings. His Richard — an astonishing feat of creative originality — is very nearly able-bodied. He has no crutches, no twisted limbs, no bandy legs, no hump weighing him down like a medicine ball. He walks with a faint limp. He carries a withered arm discreetly under his doublet. And he has a slight suggestion of a cyst-ette on his shoulder. Otherwise, he’s perfectly formed.

George Bernard Shaw argued passionately that Britain should create a public health service. And he lived long enough (1856–1950) to become one of its earliest victims. This play from 1906 shows the very best and the very worst of his creative abilities. He had a plan: to strip bare the iniquities of private medicine and stick the knife in deep. We open in Harley Street where a gang of slick and prosperous doctors are bantering away, like tipsy clubmen, about their patients. I cured this one. I killed that one. Each quack has his preferred treatment. One thinks all disease is caused by blood poisoning. Another that surgery cures every ailment. A third that cheerful nurses and a decorative sick-bay are an infallible panacea.

A timely show at the Finborough takes us into the heart of Bashar al-Assad’s terror state. Zoe Lafferty’s verbatim piece gathers evidence from activists and torture victims and flings it straight at us. The result is utterly gruesome and utterly compelling. A fractured, blood-stained snapshot of an ancient monstrosity blundering towards its own funeral. Syria, a Russian sidekick state, still pursues the traditions of Marxist totalitarianism. Every morning, ranks of schoolkids salute their leader. ‘Unity, Freedom, Socialism’ they chant in honour of a regime which traduces all three ideals. The Alawi minority, making up 12 per cent of the population, controls everything. Western music and literature are ruthlessly censored.

OK, I was wrong. I’ve said it a million times but I now realise it’s perfectly feasible. Antique dramas can make sense in a modern location. Nicholas Hytner sets Timon of Athens slap bang in the middle of present-day London. The action begins in a mock-up of the National Gallery’s Sainsbury wing, complete with that dull, forbidding grey hue that some miserable nutcase chose for the walls. Ominously, hanging centre-stage, is El Greco’s swirly pink vision of Christ ejecting the moneylenders from the temple. A launch party is in full swing. Champagne flows. A gang of yuppies, toadies, spivs and freeloaders has gathered to toast the opening of the ‘Timon Wing’. Glamorous sycophants hover around the millionaire philanthropist crying, ‘Timon, Timon!

Michael Frayn is a schizophrenic. His creative personality bestrides the English Channel. When he’s at home he writes traditional West End farces with amusing titles and plenty of jokes. When he sits at his European desk he comes up with dour, static, talk-heavy historical dramas with boring titles and no jokes at all. Democracy, written in 2003, is a classic Euro-bureau production. Frayn invites us to examine Willy Brandt’s stewardship of West Germany in the early 1970s. Willy is referred to throughout as ‘Villy’ which, for some reason, sounds even more silly than just Willy. Chancellor Villy has a couple of problems. He’s an idealist and he wants the free world to embrace the eastern bloc and to give the misunderstood Soviets a big, warm, sloppy hug.

Fear is a new drama by Dominic Savage and it’s one of the nastiest plays I’ve ever seen. It’s also one of the most scrappily written. Yet the subject matter and the clunky script make it weirdly captivating. We meet a pair of teenage muggers who hang around posh bits of London scoping out victims and totting up their ‘net worth’. A typical yuppie banker sports about five grand’s worth of portable accessories: Swiss watch, smart phone, designer briefcase, bespoke shoes, wallet full of cash. And these two muggers are expert valuers of lucrative prey. When they strike, they seek more than just upmarket goods. They want revenge as well.

Off to Narnia. Director Rupert Goold has recreated C.S. Lewis’s permafrosted fantasy world in a circus tent moored in Kensington Gardens. And at the height of summer too. An impossible feat. But tons of cash, and many months of preparation, have been sunk into this effort. The show starts with The Wardrobe looming up in the middle of the stage, like a fat slab of mystery, a sort of Tardis perhaps, or the Kaaba at Mecca. Not much like a wardrobe, though. A child steps out and finds herself in a freaky kingdom run by a demented tundra-monger. Here she comes. Sally Dexter, playing the queen in a luminous white bedsheet, cackles sexily and yells commands at her cowering minions. Then she whooshes off in a great surge of whip cracks and dry ice. ‘Was that a bit scary?

It’s all Kenneth Halliwell’s fault. By bashing in Joe Orton’s head with a hammer, he brought the playwright’s career to a premature halt when Orton was still experimenting with brittle and anarchic farces. Had Orton lived beyond 34, he’d have developed his technique and become a richer, truer and more rounded artist. And What the Butler Saw would now be a minor work by a major playwright. Instead it’s a major work by a minor playwright. Uneven in tone, lumpish in detail, unsure of its creative purpose, this is a problem play that doesn’t merit its status as a classic. Orton dashed it off in a few weeks and the script was discovered, after his death, lying in a drawer.