Culture

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.

After all the splendiferous photographs of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, how about something more subversive? That is what Kew Palace delivers in its exhibition of George III caricatures from the collection of Lord Baker. This is royalty filtered not through the flattering lenses of the modern photographer, but through the sharp nibs of 18th-century cartoonists such as James Gillray. The results are vicious. Delightfully so. The fashion among Gillray and his co-conspirators was to lampoon the King for his interest in agriculture. ‘Farmer George’ is shown as more mouldy peasant than monarch, with billowing lips and the shoulder-heavy gait of an ox. But this is nothing compared with the satirical treatment of his wife, Queen Charlotte.

Sir Tom and Sir Trevor — Stoppard and Nunn — have teamed up to realise Sir Trevor’s ‘40-year dream’ of bringing Sir Tom’s breakthrough play to the West End. Sir Tom and Sir Trevor — Stoppard and Nunn — have teamed up to realise Sir Trevor’s ‘40-year dream’ of bringing Sir Tom’s breakthrough play to the West End. I couldn’t make the opening night and Sir T (x 2) had restricted press seats to that performance only so I had to make my own arrangements. What a bunch of highwaymen those ticket agencies are! (I’ll get to the play in a second.) You have to pay for the privilege of paying for the privilege. The fee amounted to 20 per cent of the entire outlay.

I bumped into a restoration expert last week. ‘What’s new in heritage these days?’ I asked him. ‘Oh, same old, same old,’ he told me. I bumped into a restoration expert last week. ‘What’s new in heritage these days?’ I asked him. ‘Oh, same old, same old,’ he told me. In similar vein, London has been enjoying a spate of classic revivals on stage. At the Donmar a production of Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love) has been barmily retitled Luise Miller. This promotes a minor character to the protagonist’s role. It incorrectly suggests the atmosphere of Romford roundabouts and roaring hen parties.

Here’s the thing. This box-set business. Do you get it? I tried. I failed. But everyone else goes stark raving mad about these fictional treasures. Once you’ve sampled a box set (or boxed-set?), you’re hooked. Here’s the thing. This box-set business. Do you get it? I tried. I failed. But everyone else goes stark raving mad about these fictional treasures. Once you’ve sampled a box set (or boxed-set?), you’re hooked. You won’t be seen again until you’ve visited every corner of the dream kingdom encased within its magical walls. Didn’t happen to me, though. I sat through the first six minutes of The Wire in total bafflement.

A miracle at the Barbican. I reached the venue after a mere half an hour blundering around following directions from helpful staff. The main stage, which is so vast it feels like an open-air theatre, is the result of an alluring misconception of scale. You build a venue the size of the cosmos and you get universal art. But art finds its own measure. If the habitat suits the substance all should be well. The latest delight here is an update of Sheridan’s The School for Scandal directed by Deborah Warner with a very classy cast and an absolute ton of money. Warner, a recent arrival at Obvious Island, wants us to know that today’s fashion-obsessed culture is just like the beau monde of the 18th century. Wow. Not much gets past you, eh, Debs? Everything is a mishmash.

Edward Albee doesn’t like the word ‘revival’. His plays aren’t dead, he says, just lurking. His 1966 drama A Delicate Balance has been coaxed back into the limelight by James Macdonald in a sumptuous new version starring Penelope Wilton and Imelda Staunton. Edward Albee doesn’t like the word ‘revival’. His plays aren’t dead, he says, just lurking. His 1966 drama A Delicate Balance has been coaxed back into the limelight by James Macdonald in a sumptuous new version starring Penelope Wilton and Imelda Staunton. We’re in a New England mansion whose unshowy opulence is brilliantly suggested by designer Laura Hopkins. The chairs are elegant, costly and fading. The shelves are neatly crammed with dilapidated classics.

The RSC isn’t limited to Shakespeare. The RSC isn’t limited to Shakespeare. It’s also one of the richest and most prolific fringe operations in the country. ‘We have between 30 and 40 writers working on plays for us at any one time.’ Golly. Some Stratford bigwig wants to tell the tale of the Russian space programme so a Casualty writer, Rona Munro, has been hired to knock out a script. The programme note is an act of contrition. ‘I have had to take some glaring liberties with time and space and imagined events,’ Munro confesses. A strange approach to scientific history. ‘I ask forgiveness of the dead,’ she goes on, ‘and the indulgence of the living, some of whom have been fictionalised.’ OK, love.

Let’s think about it. How did Harold Pinter write his masterpieces? And why are they praised so much more lavishly than the scribbles of his contemporaries? Let’s think about it. How did Harold Pinter write his masterpieces? And why are they praised so much more lavishly than the scribbles of his contemporaries? Moonlight, his 1993 play, has been slickly revived at the Donmar and it opens with a dying pensioner sprawling luxuriously in a double-bed and ranting at his wife. Across stage his sons engage in madcap vaudevillian banter. Other characters wander in and speak fluent nonsense. A girl, who is also a ghost, articulates charming drivel about moonshine and memory. The characters fail to communicate and the dramatist fails to communicate why they fail to communicate.

Throughout his career Clifford Odets was overshadowed by Arthur Miller. Nowadays, his plays tend to be classified on a topsy-turvy scale beginning with the least completely forgotten. One of the lesser forgotten, A Rocket to the Moon, is a flawed, steamy, bourgeois melodrama. At first it seems crammed with gestures that don’t quite gel. The setting, a New York dental practice, seems to symbolise the American dream with the handbrake on. The characters’ names hint at their function. Belle is a flouncing beauty, Mr Prince is jolly rich, Willy Wax is a slippery, priapic seducer. There’s an earnest deadbeat dentist, Ben Stark, whose name vividly evokes the lead in his boots.

Incredibly boring. That’s how a cracking courtroom drama seems at first. Case closed. We know whodunnit already. Alma Rattenbury, a luscious middle-aged nympho, has bashed in the skull of her deaf old husband with the help of a teenage builder, George, who shares her bed. Incredibly boring. That’s how a cracking courtroom drama seems at first. Case closed. We know whodunnit already. Alma Rattenbury, a luscious middle-aged nympho, has bashed in the skull of her deaf old husband with the help of a teenage builder, George, who shares her bed. Newspapers carry lurid reports of a drunken Alma dancing in her husband’s blood and trying to seduce the policemen who came to arrest her.

Lloyd Evans meets Niamh Cusack, who ‘absolutely wasn’t going to be an actress’ She doesn’t usually do it this way. When Niamh Cusack heard that the Old Vic was planning to stage Terence Rattigan’s final play, Cause Célèbre, she read a synopsis, found a part that excited her, and asked her agent to get her an audition. ‘I’ve never approached a production like that,’ she tells me. ‘But it’s a cracking play, really, well written — a rollicking courtroom drama with great characters and fascinating relationships.’ We meet in a dressing-room at the Old Vic and make ourselves comfortable amid the higgledy-piggledy apparatus of a Feydeau farce whose run is drawing to a close.