Culture

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.