Culture

Plays used to end in marriage. Then they anatomised the highs and lows of life as a couple. Now — at least in Neil LaBute’s latest London première — the relationships are all either over or heading that way fast. Reasons to Be Pretty (Almeida, until 14 January) gives a spot-on depiction of those no-man’s-land months following a break-up, when relations between exes are loaded with an electric ambiguity, and contradictory feelings alternate with bewildering rapidity. After an apocalyptic row in the first scene, estranged Greg and Steph keep bumping into each other about town.

It’s a palace drama with all the trimmings. Trevor Nunn’s new production, The Lion in Winter, plunges us into the court of Henry II and his spurned wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, as they struggle to decide which of their three sons should inherit the throne. Eleanor, held prisoner in a deluxe royal fortress, has been granted leave to join the family at Christmas. ‘Thanks for letting me out,’ she says, on their first meeting. ‘It’s only for the holidays,’ jokes Henry. Clearly a king who locks his wife in the broom cupboard won’t pay much heed to her views on the succession. So there’s an emotional and dramatic illogicality here right from the start. And, right from the start, the playwright couldn’t give a stuff. Which helps.

I take no pleasure in saying this but the director of the National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner, appears to have lost his sense of propriety. Or possibly the balance of his mind. He’s asked John Hodge (author of the Trainspotting screenplay) to write a sitcom about the Great Terror. And, rather than bunging it in the nearest skip, Mr Hytner has decided to direct it at the Cottesloe. The blood-stained gag-fest begins in 1938 when a secret policeman orders Russia’s leading satirist, Mikhail Bulgakov, to write a play about Stalin’s early life. Bulgakov meets the Great Leader and Teacher and finds him keen to assume personal control of the scriptwriting. So Bulgakov takes over Stalin’s day job, running Russia. This inspires many hilarities in the horror-slapstick genre.

Have you ever felt the urge to rush backstage, brushing aside the objections of minders, and introduce yourself to a favourite actor? Or perhaps you’ve fantasised about dressing up in the old clothes of a Hollywood star? Don’t blush and walk away! We can reveal exclusively that you have nothing to be ashamed of. On the contrary, the future of British theatre could well be in your hands… Starting out as a producer of big commercial shows like Yes, Prime Minister or South Pacific is a hazardous business. It takes not just an eye for a good idea, and a firm managerial hand, but a hefty capital investment to boot. And if putting money into new arts projects seems foolish to private investors at the best of times, at times like these it can easily appear deranged.

Here’s an idea from the heyday of radio comedy. A soap star about to get the chop improvises an unscripted deathbed recovery during a live broadcast in order to save his career. I think it was Tony Hancock who starred in that sketch. To expand it into a full-length play would be quite a challenge. And in the 1960s Frank Marcus, a showbiz journalist, took on the job. And he struck gold. The Killing of Sister George triumphed in London and on Broadway. Now it’s back with a cast of starry comediennes. Sister George, a district nurse, is the leading character in a popular Radio 4 soap opera. One day, on a whim, the BBC execs decide to bump off the character.

Well done, the Royal Court. It’s got the art of audience abuse down to a tee. The queue for the tiny studio theatre snakes up an airless flight of stairs and bottlenecks into a doorway where each play-goer receives a personalised earbashing from an usherette. ‘Hello, did you hear all that? It’s one hour straight through. No readmission. No recording. No photography. No mobile phones. No sitting on the reserved chairs. No treading on the floor on the way to your seat. Enjoy the show. Hello, did you hear all that...?’ and so on. The floor we mustn’t tread on is strewn with a layer of sacred grit which the director insists will remain untouched by human sole before the show begins.

Once or twice a season Shakespeare gets booted out of the Globe. In his place a modern author is given a chance to shine. The Scottish writer Chris Hannan’s new play, The God of Soho, opens with a frolicsome nod to classicism. We are in heaven where two demotic deities, Mr and Mrs God, engage in caustic marital banter. Mrs God wears a colostomy bag and her affliction triggers many a harrumphing sound of flatulence from an on-stage tuba. This is hilarious, of course, and even more hilarious if you happen to be six years old. Hannan’s carping immortals turn out to be very hard to engage with. Perhaps he assumed that divinities would be fun to write. But they’re devilishly hard, bordering on the impossible. Nothing is at stake in heaven.

Anna Christie, an early Eugene O’Neill play, has brought Jude Law to the tiny Donmar Warehouse. Set in New York among migrant longshoremen, the script takes ages to get to the point. Mat Burke, a randy Oirish loon, wants to marry Anna, a winsome worldly blonde, but faces opposition from her narky, knife-wielding dad, Chris. But never mind the drama, listen to the accents. Jarring phonetics dominate the stage. David Hayman’s Chris spits out gnarled Scandinavian curses. ‘I svair to Gott, Anna, I don’t font hear it.’ Ruth Wilson’s Anna has a hard-to-place American accent which harbours many a stowaway syllable. And Law, playing de Oirishman, speaks a dialect that’s packed with extra fruity flavours.

Take one chip pan full of cooking oil, one crippled old lady and one strong-framed Irishwoman in her prime. Let the younger one heat the oil till it’s scalding, and pour it on to the older one’s trapped hand so she screams and screams (make the older one her mother, for good measure...). When she has the information she needs, have the torturer casually toss the remaining oil in her victim’s face and walk away. Now get every soul in the auditorium rooting for the daughter. Not possible? Go to see The Beauty Queen of Leenane (Young Vic, until 3 September) — and think again. In Martin McDonagh’s tightly woven little masterpiece, the hilarious and the spine-chilling are uncomfortably well blended.

Kafka, I was informed at school, was a genius. Now that I’ve grown up a bit I can see that my teachers were being typically overgenerous in their estimate of moderate abilities. Kafka was a cartoonist. He’s the Magritte of literature. His outlandish surrealism is so potent that it has succeeded in occupying the imaginations of people who’ve never encountered the work in person. Much of his mystique rests on his name. If he were called King, not Kafka, and Stephen, not Franz, he’d attract far less pious adulation. But he’s all right, Kafka, if you fancy an hour or two of Tremulous Significance. His short story, In the Penal Colony, has been regularly adapted for the stage and at the Young Vic a Palestinian troupe, ShiberHur, is having a crack at it.