Culture

His brain clouded with opium fumes, Jean Cocteau wrote Les Parents Terribles in just one week. It opens like a Greek tragedy crossed with a madcap sitcom. The ageing beauty Yvonne prances around her Bohemian apartment pining and weeping for her son, Michael, who has gone missing. When he turns up safe and sound, she throws herself into ecstasies of relief, leads him to the chaise-longue and showers his face and lips with kisses. He then breaks the news that he’s in love with a typist. She reacts like a cobra touched with a cattle prod. Spitting with anger she denounces the ‘lying hussy’, and vows never to let an intruder steal away her happiness and leave her to die neglected and unloved.

Christmas approaches. And kitchens and playrooms across the land resound with the joyous tinkle of little Josephs and Marys rehearsing their roles in the Nativity play. My four-year-old son, making his debut in a farmyard cameo, has just one line, ‘I’m a donkey and I’m very tired,’ which he repeats endlessly to the delight of his beaming dad. So I can only imagine the levels of pride surging through the families of Ciara Southwood and Madison Lygo as they prepared for the lead roles of Mimi and Janey in the Royal Court’s new play Kin, which is set in a girls’ prep school. The homes of these lucky ten-year-old actresses will have echoed with the play’s exquisitely turned dialogue. ‘Lazy shit,’ says Janey.

The Nobel prize is nothing. The real badge of literary greatness is the addition of the ‘esque’ suffix to one’s name and, if you’re truly outstanding, the word ‘nightmare’, too. Franz Kafka manages this distinguished double, although some readers find the connotations of horror arise not so much from his totalitarian dystopias as from his prose. But it’s best to approach Kafka with an open mind. The Nobel prize is nothing. The real badge of literary greatness is the addition of the ‘esque’ suffix to one’s name and, if you’re truly outstanding, the word ‘nightmare’, too.

Ed Hall, boss of the Hampstead theatre, places before our consideration a new play by Athol Fugard. The gong-grabbing, apartheid-drubbing South African author creates dramas that are rich in humanity and compassion, filled with curiosity about the architecture of suffering, and distinguished by flights of poetic soulfulness. And by God, they’re dull. Fugard doesn’t do action, romance or suspense. He does chat. Lots of it. His monologues stream in and out of one another in a textured gloop of Oscar-hinting earnestness. Generally, he deploys the same easy-to-assemble stage furniture: a shack dumped on the orange savannah surrounded by poverty-stricken fences. The shack can be assembled from the contents of a skip. The fencing can be cadged from nearby allotments.

As Iraq fades from view so does our outrage at the crimes it provoked. Three monologues by Judith Thompson may cure our amnesia. Forgetting atrocities is an essential preliminary to repeating them. We meet a girl soldier (based on Lynndie England although not identified as her), who faces trial for brutalising prisoners at Abu Ghraib. At school she was a bullied bully, an opportunistic sadist who instigated attacks on others as a survival mechanism. Once she invited a girl with a false leg to a house-party where a gang removed the prosthetic limb, cut it to pieces, and jeeringly ordered the girl to crawl home. At Abu Ghraib, this self-defence technique serves her again, and she strives to impress the male soldiers by devising pantomime humiliations.

It’s noisy here in the bar at the Old Vic; the air is teeming with thespy gossip and laughter and clinking glasses. It’s noisy here in the bar at the Old Vic; the air is teeming with thespy gossip and laughter and clinking glasses. I’m sitting in a corner with the actress Rachael Stirling, who is drinking white wine and talking about her new play, An Ideal Husband. Luckily, Rachael has that actress’s knack for projecting her voice without shouting. I can hear her clearly above the din. She has a very fine voice, in fact, smooth and husky at the same time. She sounds like a public schoolgirl who has smoked too many cigarettes. Rachael is excited after a long day of rehearsals. Taking a script from her handbag, she thumbs through it impatiently.

Thank God for the critics. All failings can be laid at their door. Robert Lindsay appeared on a telly sofa last week to repudiate the shirtier reviews of Onassis. ‘It’s not a critic play,’ he said. And I wondered if ‘critic’ had changed grammatical species and become an adjective meaning ‘good’. The show has its moments but the script is devoid of dramatic intelligence. Proper plays open with a dilemma that enlists the audience’s sympathies, unifies the action and creates suspense. Plenty of options were available to playwright Martin Sherman. Would Onassis succeed in replacing Maria Callas with Jackie Kennedy? Would he destroy his son Alexander’s romance with an ageing English divorcee?

Regime change at Hampstead Theatre. The era of special measures is over and Ed Hall, son of Sir Peter, has taken charge. Hall’s debut show is daring in its complete lack of audacity. Regime change at Hampstead Theatre. The era of special measures is over and Ed Hall, son of Sir Peter, has taken charge. Hall’s debut show is daring in its complete lack of audacity. Shelagh Stephenson’s new play Enlightenment is the sort of bourgeois frippery we were used to yawning through under the previous administration. We’re in a posh house in Angstead Garden Suburb where two yuppie liberals are struggling to cope with the disappearance of their gap-year son in south-east Asia. Mum consults a psychic. Dad invites a TV producer to make a shock-doc highlighting their plight.

Who’s my favourite stage actress? Since you ask, Olivia Williams in Shakespeare and Nancy Carroll in anything. Who’s my favourite stage actress? Since you ask, Olivia Williams in Shakespeare and Nancy Carroll in anything. Currently, she’s starring in the weirdest show I’ve ever seen at the Almeida in Islington. Weird because it’s so predictable. The Almeida likes to attract the purists rather than the tourists and it seeks out half-forgotten masterpieces or wacky new experiments. If you want Carpathian tragedy or biblical mock-epic or Inuit slapstick, then the Almeida’s the place to look. A stage version of a David Mamet movie is positively abnormal by its standards.

Let’s talk about Tucker. The Beeb’s mockumentary The Thick of It has been hailed as a brilliantly incisive glimpse into the corridors of power, and its diabolical protagonist, the scheming spin-merchant Malcolm Tucker, is regarded as a hilarious portrait of a modern political propagandist. That’s one view, anyway. Maybe I’ve got a blind spot. Maybe my sense of humour’s gone missing. Maybe I romanticise the ideals of public service because my mum and dad worked in Whitehall, but I’ve never understood the praise heaped on this cruel and distorted fantasy. It’s possible to overlook the relentless swearing, the vapid characterisation and the ever-predictable storylines.

Clybourne Park Royal Court, until 2 October Tiny Kushner Tricycle, until 25 September Bash the bourgeoisie is a game the Royal Court likes playing and I’m always keen to join in. Bruce Norris, a brilliant American satirist, delighted us a few years back with The Pain and the Itch, a hilarious exposure of middle-class hypocrisy. Clybourne Park is a pair of plays set in a house in the prosperous Chicago suburbs. We start in the 1950s when black families are just arriving in the neighbourhood. We then fast-forward 60 years and see prosperous whites returning after decades of poverty and neglect. The earlier play feels very wonky. The dice are overloaded against the whites. As well as their black servants, they have a deaf friend and a kid next door with Down’s syndrome.

Maggie’s End Shaw Death and the King’s Horseman Olivier Here’s an unexpected treat. An angry left-wing play crammed with excellent jokes. Ed Waugh and Trevor Wood’s lively bad-taste satire starts with Margaret Thatcher’s death. A populist New Labour Prime Minister rashly opts to grant her a state funeral which prompts a furious reaction in Labour’s northern heartlands. Former poll-tax rebel Leon Thomas organises a protest march to London intent on disrupting the ceremony and shaming the government. To complicate matters, Leon’s daughter Rosa is a rising Labour MP entangled with the super-smooth Home Secretary (with the slightly-too-clever name Neil Callaghan). In the opening scene Rosa is discovered tupping Callaghan on a parliamentary desk.

No Man’s Land Duke of York’s Mine Hampstead Slow, fractured, monumental, ineluctable, No Man’s Land lurches at you like a disintegrating ice shelf. The first act opens with two drunks staggering around a Hampstead mansion downing whisky and making oblique statements of self-revelation. Spooner, a broken-down poet, has been invited home by Hirst, a millionaire author on the verge of mental collapse. They appear to be strangers. When Hirst’s two manservants, Briggs and Foster, carry him off to bed they turn on Spooner and try to intimidate him. But Spooner has nothing to lose — ‘I have never been loved; from this I derive my strength’ — and brushes aside their menaces. Cut to the following morning. Spooner is unchanged, Hirst transformed.

Girl with a Pearl Earring Theatre Royal Haymarket Waste Almeida Creditors Donmar I don’t know much about art but I know what I dislike. Art history. It forces one to view paintings and sculpture through the medium of literature. Every word spoken in appreciation of art is a step away from true art appreciation, which is inevitably unconscious, illiterate, oblivious to itself. The more you know, the less you feel. Those who enjoy art understand these limitations and long for fresh ways to approach their pursuit. Soap opera provides a surprisingly satisfying point of entry and here’s the latest daub-drama, Girl with a Pearl Earring, a fictional narrative about Vermeer’s enigmatic portrait of sexy innocence.