Lloyd Evans

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.

Sheridan Smith’s new show is more a mystery than a musical. Opening Night is based on a 1977 film by John Cassavetes that failed to attract a major US distributor. After opening briefly in LA, it vanished without trace. It’s a backstage drama about a tattooed drunk, Myrtle, who accepts the lead role in a new play which she starts to dislike. Realising her error, she tries to improve the script at the rehearsals and during preview performances ahead of the opening on Broadway. In real life, an actor who sabotaged a show like this would be fired and replaced. But never mind. This is make-believe. Myrtle’s attempts to vandalise the script are opposed by the producer, the director and the writer, and they each moan to her in private about her behaviour.

Set in 1948, The Human Body is about four heroic women fighting to create the NHS despite opposition from right-wing extremists led by the ‘snob’ and ‘warmonger’ Winston Churchill. One of these heroic women is a Labour councillor, another is a physician on a bike, the third works at Westminster for a socialist MP and the fourth is a hard-working mother married to a violent drunk. What’s odd about Lucy Kirkwood’s new play is that these four women co-exist within a single figure: Dr Elcock (Keeley Hawes).

Double Feature is a new play by John Logan, whose credits include Skyfall. The subject is movie-making, and the action is set in 1964 in a Hollywood cottage where Alfred Hitchcock is preparing Tippi Hedren for a nude scene in Marnie. The great director, who made a star of the unknown Hedren by casting her in The Birds, has all the power here. He positively quivers to get her into bed and yet he hesitates because he’s three times her age and nine times her girth. Nobody, not even a director of Kent’s powers, can make a gourmet feast out of two half-eaten pizzas Their interactions have a gruesome master-slave vibe and it’s hard to know whose side to take. The control-freak director who appears physically revolting despite his natty suit?

Sarah Snook, who appeared in Succession, takes centre stage in Kip Williams’s adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s only novel. The best thing about The Picture of Dorian Gray is the narrative premise: a young aristocrat commissions a portrait of himself and the image grows old while he retains his youthful good looks. It’s a ghost story, really, and Dorian ‘dies’ when the portrait is completed and then haunts his own life as an ageless and untouchable spirit. Wilde used the book as a literary showcase for his aphorisms. On ageing: ‘The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.

Big budget, huge stage, massive temptation. The Lyttelton is a notorious elephant-trap for designers who feel obliged to fill every inch of space with effortful proof of their brilliance. Frankie Bradshaw, designer of Dear Octopus, avoids these snares and instead creates a modest playing area, smaller than the actual stage, which is bookended by a doorway on one side and a fireplace on the other. These physical boundaries draw the actors towards the middle of the stage with a staircase overhead to complete the frame. Brilliant stuff. Perfectly simple, too. Any director planning to work at the Lyttelton should see Emily Burns’s fabulous production. So should everyone else.

Fifteen years after penning his mega-hit Jerusalem, Jez Butterworth has knocked out a new drama. The slightly baffling title, The Hills of California, refers to a hit by Johnny Mercer (the US songwriter not the MP for Plymouth) and it suggests American themes and locations. But the show is set in a knackered old Blackpool boarding house in the 1970s, where three sisters are waiting for their elderly mum to croak. It takes an hour of chit-chat to explain what’s happening. When the sisters were little, their ambitious mother forced them to perform song-and-dance routines in the hope of launching them as kiddie superstars on the new medium of television. The eldest girl, Joan, quit the group at the age of 15 and fled to America to make it big.

Till the Stars Come Down is a raucous, high-energy melodrama set at a wedding in Hull. The writer, Beth Steel, focuses on three female characters and virtually ignores the men in her story which is just as well because her male characters all talk and act like planks. Her women are full of courage, craziness and fun. This is a hit. West End, easily Broadway, maybe. Pack your bags, girls We meet Sylvia, the anxious bride, who fears that her family won’t accept her Polish spouse, Marek. Her sister, Hazel, is facing a romantic crisis because her husband has stopped paying her attention in bed. And sexy Maggie harbours a secret that’s bound to spill out during the drunken festivities. The three shrieking women exchange ribald gags.