Lloyd Evans is The Spectator's sketch-writer and theatre critic
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An odd affair, PMQs. Few blows were landed, no blood was spilled. The party leaders tussled over a handful of fifth-order issues. Sir Keir Starmer suggested that the escaped terror suspect Daniel Khalife should have been held as a Category A prisoner. Rishi Sunak scolded the great barrister for not knowing that unconvicted suspects are
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Anthropology is a drama about artificial intelligence that starts as an ultra-gloomy soap opera. A suicidal lesbian, Merril, speaks on the phone to her kid sister, Angie, and they discuss Merril’s beautiful ex-girlfriend. After ten minutes, we learn that Angie’s voice belongs to a robot, Digital Angie, created by Merril to replicate the real Angie
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Crumbling concrete dominated PMQs. Sir Keir climbed to his feet and announced in sepulchral tones that most of Britain’s schools are likely to be flattened by the first stiff breeze of autumn. He gave an example, from May 2018, of a primary school that suddenly imploded ‘over the weekend, and thankfully no children were injured’.
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Macbeth at the Globe wants to put us at our ease and make us feel comfortable with the play’s arcane world of ghouls, hallucinations and murderous prophecies. Abigail Graham’s up-to-the-minute production offers a few nods to history, like the eagle masks worn by the three witches, but for some reason they speak in dense cockney
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Bleach and germs are the central themes of Dr Semmelweis, written by Mark Rylance and Stephen Brown. The opening scene, set in the 1860s, presents the harmless old doctor as a charming oddball who adores playing chess with his happy, clever wife. This is code: Semmelweis is an intellectual and a feminist whom it’s safe
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Lucy Prebble belongs to the posse of scribblers responsible for the HBO hit, Succession. Perhaps in honour of this distinction, her 2012 play, The Effect, has been revived at the National by master-director Jamie Lloyd. The show is a sitcom set in Britain’s most dysfunctional drug-testing facility where two sexy young volunteers, Tristan and Connie,
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The Mitfords is a superb one-woman show by Emma Wilkinson Wright who focuses her attention on Unity, Diana and Jessica. In the early 1930s, Unity became Hitler’s lover and she lived in a luxurious Munich apartment confiscated from a wealthy Jewish family. The Führer, whom she nicknamed ‘Wolfie’, gave her the pearl-handled revolver with which
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Even in her absence, Nicola Sturgeon dominated Iain Dale’s discussion with Alex Salmond and David Davis at the Edinburgh festival. Dale invited them both to comment on George Galloway’s suggestion that Sturgeon is ‘Mrs Thatcher in a kilt.’ Salmond flatly rejected this caricature. (Evidently he knows that criticising her in public will do him no
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A chilly August in Edinburgh. Colder than it’s been for 20 years and the city looks scruffier than ever. Locked Portakabins squat in elegant stone courtyards. Unused site machinery lies abandoned outside neoclassical museums. Pavements and bridges are scarred by ugly steel roadblocks, and lurid street signs mar the visual harmony of virtually every thoroughfare.
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Mick Lynch, the general secretary of the RMT, has never felt truly English. In conversation with Iain Dale at the Edinburgh festival, he reveals that his parents moved here from Ireland during the war and settled in the Ladbroke Grove area of London where they raised him and his four siblings. His father was ‘an
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The Royal Court’s new topical satire, Word-Play, opens with a gaffe-prone Tory prime minister giving a TV interview in which he commends Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. The Downing Street press team suffer a meltdown as they struggle to draft an apology or a retraction. Opposition parties try to profit from the blunder and
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The boss of the Royal Court, Vicky Featherstone, will soon step down and she’s using her final spell in charge to try an unusual experiment. Can she entertain the punters and make them feel happy rather than forcing them to confront various forms of gloom, misery and despair? The answer is yes. Featherstone can tickle
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Ian Blackford, the SNP MP, is to stand down at the next election. And last night he gave an interview to Anand Menon of the think-tank UK In a Changing Europe. The mood was cosy, the questions as soft as marshmallows. Menon opened with the issue of independence and he allowed Blackford to change the
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The tectonic plates were shifting at PMQs. Sir Keir Starmer asked Rishi Sunak if the total NHS waiting list of 7.2 million had risen or fallen during his nine months in office. Rishi said the number was up because striking medics are denying treatment to the people whose taxes pay for it. He suggested that
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In the 1990s, the BBC had a popular flat-share comedy, Men Behaving Badly, about a pair of giggling bachelors who were scolded and dominated by their mummy-substitute girl-friends. The author, Simon Nye, has written a historical crime caper about the theft of the crown jewels in 1671, as Charles II prepared to celebrate his tenth
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Blindness, ignorance and folly were on fully display at PMQs. Rishi Sunak was absent in Vilnius where he’s busy discussing with his Nato chums how to prolong or escalate the war in Ukraine. His deputy, Oliver Dowden, tried to fend off some excellent, probing questions from Labour’s Angela Rayner. She berated the Tories for overseeing
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Beneatha’s Place, set in the 1950s, follows a black couple who encounter racial prejudice when they move to a predominately white suburb. The location is Nigeria but it might as well be the USA because most of the characters, both black and white, are American. (The Young Vic has strong links with America, and a
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The birthday of our sacred NHS was celebrated at PMQs. Appropriately enough there was a lengthy waiting-list of MPs ready to pay insincere tribute to the medics who care for the sick once they’ve finished painting rainbows on their faces and rehearsing dance-moves in the corridors. Rishi Sunak ducked the session altogether. He was at
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Nothing demonstrates the inanity of profanity like an undercooked comedy. The famous Spitting Image puppets have returned in a political musical that’s more cuddly than cutting. Writers Matt Forde and Al Murray add a lot of swearing to their punchlines without understanding why. The temptation to use the F-bomb is a warning sign from the
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‘Hold your nerve.’ Rishi’s ill-judged advice to voters last Sunday was perhaps his worst blunder yet. At PMQs it came up half a dozen times. Sir Keir Starmer made the first attempt but he was too verbose to inflict real damage. ‘Rather than lecturing others on holding their nerve why not locate his?’ He exposed
