Lloyd Evans

After nearly 40 years, Withnail has arrived on stage. Sean Foley directs Bruce Robinson’s adaptation, which starts with a live rock-band thumping out a few 1960s hits. The musicians take cameo roles as maids and coppers. The show needs a larger cast especially for the tea-room scene – ‘We want the finest wines available to humanity’ – which calls for a big crowd of crumbling old crocks. Never mind. The production would have thrilled diehard fans. As for newcomers, they would probably have been better to start with the film. This production of Withnail would have thrilled diehard fans – newcomers less so Robert Sheehan delivers a glitzy, karaoke version of Withnail which is all surface and very little inner torment.

Fawlty Towers at the Apollo may be the best museum piece you’ll ever see. A full-length play has been carved out of three episodes: ‘The Hotel Inspectors’, ‘The Germans’, and ‘Communication Problems’ in which the deaf guest, Mrs Richards, made a nuisance of herself by refusing to switch on her hearing aid in case the batteries ran out. For anyone who saw the sitcom in the 1970s, this is a pleasantly weird show. It’s like returning to a seaside funfair after half a century and finding all the rides unchanged and the staff more or less as you remember them. If Beckett had written family comedies he might have created something as amusing as this Paul Nicholas makes an even better Major than the Major. And his rich, fruity voice is an unexpected treat.

Minority Report is a plodding bit of sci-fi based on a Steven Spielberg movie made more than two decades ago. The setting is London, 2050, and every citizen has been implanted with an undetectably tiny neuroscanner which informs the cops about crimes before they’ve been committed. However, as the first scene reveals, the undetectably tiny neuroscanner can be removed from the flesh with a corkscrew. The character who gouges out her tag is a computer geek, Julia, who invented the surveillance method in the first place. She stands accused of planning a murder and she goes on the run to clear her name. The actors appear to be trapped inside a tangerine lunchbox Sound familiar?

Agathe by Angela J. Davis follows the early phases of the Rwanda genocide 30 years ago. The subject, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, became prime minister on 18 July 1993 but her tenure ended abruptly when she was assassinated by a rioting mob which surrounded the UN compound where she was sheltering on 7 April 1994. She saved her children, according to some accounts, by sacrificing her own life. This is a rough-and-ready play that tells the story impressionistically through monologues, rap lyrics, news broadcasts and reconstructed scenes at the UN headquarters. It doesn’t pretend to offer a full historical account but it generates a horrible mood of impending doom.

Our Mutual Friend has been turned into a musical with a new title, London Tide, which sounds duller and more forgettable than the original. Why change the name? To confuse fans of Dickens, presumably, and to keep the theatre half-empty while heaps of tickets are sold at a discount. At the end of Act One, an actor explains the entire plot. This might have been delivered earlier The plot is a cheesy Victorian whodunnit involving three main characters and multiple locations so it’s hard to follow the action as it flits from this lowly hovel to that seedy tavern. The chief personalities are a pretentious lawyer, a psychotic teacher and a shifty lodger who won’t reveal his name.

Play-goers, beware. Director Robert Icke is back in town, and that means a turgid four-hour revival of a heavyweight classic with every actor screaming, bawling, weeping, howling and generally overdoing it. But here’s a surprise. Player Kings, Icke’s new version of Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, is a dazzling piece of entertainment and the only exaggerated performance comes from Sir Ian McKellen who plays Falstaff, quite rightly, as a noisy, swaggering dissembler. Those who imagine ‘Shakespearean comedy’ to be an oxymoron will be pleasantly surprised Small details deliver large dividends. The tavern scenes are set in an east London hipster bar with chipped wooden tables and exposed brickwork. Richard Coyle’s Henry IV has been costumed to resemble the chain-smoking George VI.

The Divine Mrs S is a backstage satire set in the year 1800, when flouncy costumes and elaborate English prose were common cultural ornaments. On press night the venue was full of resting actors and theatrical hangers-on who adored the show’s in-jokes and rehearsal-room wisecracks. Titus Andronicus is ‘an experimental play about a pie’, says an actor. Another thesp demonstrates how to enliven a dreary line by pretending that one’s character is in love. This tedious act of defamation belongs in the bin. Or the Radio 4 early-evening comedy slot The production looks immensely stylish and the company are clearly having a ball, but the ordinary punter may find it tiresome. A few minutes of pastiche is amusing but this lasts well over two hours and it takes nothing seriously.

If you’ve heard good reports about MJ the Musical, believe them all and multiply everything by a hundred. As a music-and-dance spectacular, the show is as exhilarating as any Jackson produced while he was alive. The sets, the costumes, the choreography and the live band deliver an amazing collective punch. When he removes his black trilby he looks like Rishi Sunak at a karaoke bar The script, by Lynn Nottage, takes us into Jackson’s twisted personal history. He was one of ten children raised in a four-room shack in Gary, Indiana, by weirdo parents. His mother was a Jehovah’s Witness who refused to celebrate birthdays or Christmas.

Faith Healer is a classic Oirish wrist-slasher about three sponging half-wits caught in a downward spiral of penury, booze, squalor, sexual repression, bad healthcare, murderous violence and non-stop drizzle. The mood of grinding despair never lets up for a second as the healer, Frank Hardy, along with his moaning wife and their Cockney sidekick, motors around the British Isles trying to cadge pennies from cripples in exchange for bogus cures. Every cliché in the rich thesaurus of Celtic misery is brought together in this rancid melodrama about mob justice.