Culture

Great title, Long Day’s Journey into Night. The sombre, majestic words are suffused with auguries of doom. ‘A play of old sorrow written in tears and blood,’ was O’Neill’s description of the script, which is inspired by his personal background. We’re in a beautiful seaside mansion where a prosperous New York family, the Tyrones, are living in great splendour. But beneath the gorgeous surface everything’s going to hell. The oldest son is a washed-up actor who can’t keep away from the local knocking-shop. The younger boy, a preppie drifter, keeps coughing TB spores into his hankie. The mother, still grieving for a lost child, is hooked on morphine. And the whisky-soaked dad is a millionaire who can’t bear to switch on a spare light bulb.

John Webster had one amazing skill. He could craft lines that glow in the memory like radioactive gems. ‘A politician is the devil’s quilted anvil; he fashions all sins on him, and the blows are never heard.’ Eliot loved him. Pinter used to stroll around the parks of Hackney shouting his soundbites into the sky. But Webster never discovered how to put his highly wrought lines into the mouths of likable or captivating characters. The Duchess of Malfi is a Jacobean slasher-play, a straight-to-video Tarantino blood-fest, full of cloaked assassins and scheming dukes. We’re in an Italian court where a beautiful noblewoman, played by Eve Best, has fixed her eye on a handsome young bumpkin.

There should be a sign on the door. ‘Plotless play in progress.’ Moon on a Rainbow Shawl, by Errol John, won first prize in a 1957 scriptwriting competition organised by Kenneth Tynan and judged by Alec Guinness, Peter Ustinov, Peter Hall and others. The West End promoters thought the script uncommercial and never gave it a decent shot at success. They had a point. Errol John, an apprentice writer, hadn’t learnt how to shape his tale for the theatre and give it that insistent rat-a-tat-tat rhythm of twists and surprises that audiences expect. His languid drama is set in a Trinidad ghetto where a crew of washouts and wanna-bes bicker and copulate their way through a few steamy midsummer days. The grinding poverty seems quaint, and even attractive, to modern eyes.

Calling all thespians. Roll up, you theatre folk. The Hampstead’s new show is a dramatic love-in you can’t afford to miss. Farewell to the Theatre introduces us to Harley Granville-Barker, one of the greatest playwrights of the early 20th century, as he enjoys a sabbatical in Massachusetts in 1916. Everything is languid, atmospheric and high-minded. Granville-Barker is busy giving lectures and watching American productions of Shakespeare while one of his chums, a literature professor, has had a bust-up with another academic. It’s a pity this off-stage conflict doesn’t test or expose Granville-Barker at all. He just lolls around the garden of a country house making cold, lofty speeches about the theatre and generally being a didactic pest.

There can be no doubting the nobility of John Adams’s intentions in writing The Death of Klinghoffer to a text by Alice Goodman, nor ENO’s courage in putting it on, though they do have a captive audience for minimalist and near-minimalist operas. The work is conceived, as all commentaries tirelessly tell us, in the spirit of Bach’s Passions, in which a dramatic narrative thread alternates with arias of reflection and choruses of penance and grief. Yet Bach’s purpose was different in kind from Adams’s.

Joy of joys. Huge, fat, inebriating doses of adulation have been squirted all over Josie Rourke’s first show as the châtelaine of the Donmar Warehouse. It’s a breakthrough production in many ways. You have to break through the treacly tides of critical approval. Then you have to break through the Donmar’s overenthusiastic heating system, which sends unwary play-goers to sleep long before their bedtimes. Finally you have to break through the script — The Recruiting Officer by George Farquhar, one of those neglected classics that everyone agrees is marvellous and no one bothers to read. Hardly surprising. We’re in Herefordshire in 1706.

As a human, Maria Callas was a diva. As a musician, she was a divinity. In the early Seventies she came down from Olympus to share her wisdom with us mortals and gave a series of open classes at the Julliard in New York. These seminars inspired Terrence McNally to create a full-scale portrait of opera’s greatest star. The play opens as a biting slice of character comedy as Callas inflicts her brand of ‘coaching’ (i.e., character assassination) on three wannabe soloists. It’s amazing. She’s back. The legend walks the earth again in all her gorgeous and contradictory coloration. She’s exacting, brilliant, charming, shy, arrogant, needy, fragile, evasive, fiery, frigid, miserable, exuberant. She’s magnificently paranoid and heroically lonely.

An outbreak of heritage theatre at the National. She Stoops to Conquer, written by Oliver Goldsmith in 1773, is the ultimate mistaken-identity caper. A rich suitor woos his bride-to-be while under the impression that the home of his future in-laws is an upmarket inn. Boobs and blunders multiply until love triumphs and harmony is restored. This is marshmallow drama. Nothing is required of the audience but immobility and the occasional polite chortle. Jamie Lloyd’s handsome production gets virtually everything right. The sets by Mark Thompson are five-star stunnahs. The 18th-century drawing room, with a baronial mantelpiece and a fireplace big enough to roast an ox, will please the most avid property-porn addict. The exterior forest scene is extraordinarily lovely.

Here he comes. Royalty’s favourite crackpot is back. Alan Bennett’s trusty drama, The Madness of George III, doesn’t really have a plot, just a pathology. The king is fine, he then goes barmy, he stays barmy for a bit, he gets bashed about by sadistic healers, then he recovers. It’s less a play and more a monologue amplified by a cast of glove puppets. Each supporting character is given, at most, two attributes. William Pitt drinks and keeps his counsel. The queen snorts and whinnies like a German weightlifter. Pious equerries proclaim their loyalty. Various doctors wheedle and pontificate. The Prince of Wales, an overdressed slob, waddles in and out sounding greedy. The aristocratic Lady Pembroke trundles around like a wax cleavage in a noose of pearls.

Last November I suggested that Nicholas Hytner had gone mad. Now he confirms the diagnosis with a new satire by Nicholas Wright, Travelling Light, which is the most embarrassing and mindless blunder I’ve ever seen on a subsidised stage. Hytner’s November crime was to mount a retro sitcom about Stalin’s terror. Now he baits the Russians again with a sketch-show set among the Tsarist peasantry. Wright’s play, which Hytner directs, asks what might have happened if a crew of Jewish bumpkins had made a movie in 1900 using an early hand-cranked camera. We meet Motl Mendl, a jabbering numbskull armed with some film gear. He shoots five minutes of dreary footage in his shtetl and exhibits the results to his neighbours.

A year late but worth the wait. Last year’s centenary of Terence Rattigan’s birth brought two excellent revivals of lesser-known works, Flare Path and Cause Célèbre, to London. But the playwright’s personal story remains a subject of uncertainty and guesswork. Giles Cole’s little gem of a play, The Art of Concealment, brings the dramatist’s secret history to life. Rattigan complained that to outsiders his success seemed quite effortless. In fact, his whole career was a fluke. After dropping out of Oxford without a degree, the young wannabe was given an ultimatum by his boorish, womanising father: succeed as a playwright or take a job in the Foreign Office. Rattigan failed. Every play he sent out came boomeranging back by return of post.

Michael Grandage says farewell to the Donmar with a farewell play. Richard II tells of a glorious but profligate king compelled to hand over his realm to a workmanlike, Steady Eddie successor. Entirely devoid of romantic interest, and with only teeny-weeny roles for women, this is not a show-stopping Shakespeare favourite. It appeals to specialists who note that it marks the Bard’s transition from medieval thriller-writer to dramatic philosopher. Grandage rises to this level and puts on a production that will satisfy the most ardent purist. Richard Kent’s ecclesiastical set is ravishing. The clever split-level arrangement of arches and tracery creates a versatile warren of spaces that are entirely practical but also fully evocative of religious awe.

My German grandmother never understood the point of pantomime. She’d lived in England for more than half her life, spoke English like a native (actually, a good deal better) and had a sound appreciation of English humour, from Lewis Carroll to The Good Life. However, she was happy to admit that the panto bug had completely passed her by. She knew that pantomime was the one art form that was indefatigably British, and that no foreigner could ever hope to decipher it. Of course she was absolutely right. No other entertainment sums up our innate Euroscepticism quite like panto. And no British Christmas is complete without a chorus of ‘Oh, no you’re not!’ or ‘He’s behind you!’ That’s not to say, though, that we actually enjoy it.