Lloyd Evans

Tracy Letts’s Mary Page Marlowe is a biographical portrait of an emotionally damaged mother struggling with romantic and family problems. Susan Sarandon shares the lead with four other actresses which makes the show a little hard to follow. And the timeline is jumbled up so that the audience has to find its bearings at the

Hamlet at the National opens like a John Lewis Christmas advert. Elegant celebrations are in progress. The stage is full of dining tables draped in white linen and adorned with flowers and beautiful glassware sparkling in the candlelight. Elsinore is reimagined as the home of a multicultural royal family. Claudius, resplendent in a dark dinner

Clarkston is an American-backed production featuring a Netflix star, Joe Locke. He plays a young graduate with a terminal illness, Jake, who works at a Costco warehouse in a failing midwest town. Jake is a brainbox with an IQ of 140 who takes a scholarly interest in early American history. On his first day at

What a coincidence. Two plays running in London have the same storyline: an obsessed lover bursts into a family gathering to reclaim the woman who spurned him.The Lady from the Sea, written and directed by Simon Stone, is based on a late drama by Ibsen. Alicia Vikander stars as the neurotic Ellida, who feels repelled

A new play by Lawrence Marks and Maurice Gran, the writers of Birds of a Feather, feels like a major event. This is a period drama that examines an imaginary association between Hitler and Freud and develops into an enquiry about the nature of evil. As Hitler grows into adulthood he gravitates towards the Freud

Born With Teeth is a camp two-hander starring a pair of TV luminaries, Ncuti Gatwa and Edward Bluemel, as Marlowe and Shakespeare. The year is 1591 and the great dramatists are holed up in a tavern working on an early draft of Henry VI (Part 3). Not much writing gets done. It’s all rhetoric and

Interview is a blind-date play. Only it’s not a blind date but a showbiz interview for a journal called the New York Chronicle. The characters (played by Robert Sean Leonard and Paten Hughes) bicker, flirt and get emotionally involved during a 90-minute conversation. Naturally it all starts badly. The interviewer, Pierre, arrives at Katya’s Brooklyn

Chekhov with an English accent. That’s how Andrew Keatley’s play, The Gathered Leaves, begins. The setting is a country house where a family of recusant English Catholics meet for a weekend of surprises and high drama. The audience was on its feet, cheering and clapping, some of them in tears At first, the main conflict

Good Night, Oscar is a biographical play about Oscar Levant, a famous pianist who was also a noted wit and raconteur. The script starts as a dead-safe comedy and it develops into a gripping battle between the forces of anarchy, represented by Oscar, and the controllers of NBC who want to censor his crazy humour.

Edinburgh seems underpopulated this year. The whisky bars are half full and the throngs of tourists who usually crowd the roadways haven’t materialised. There’s a sharp chill in the air too. Anoraks and hats are worn all day, and anyone eating outdoors in the evening is dressed for base camp. Perhaps tourists don’t want to

Make It Happen is a portrait of a bullying control freak, Fred Goodwin, who turned RBS into the largest bank in the world until it came crashing down in 2008. Fred the Shred’s character makes him a tough subject for a drama. His morning meetings were called ‘morning beatings’ by terrified staff. He ordered executives