Lloyd Evans is The Spectator's sketch-writer and theatre critic
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Tony Blair was the headline act at his day-long talking-shop in London yesterday. The crowds attending the Future of Britain Conference had to sit through hours of speeches and panel discussions before the old groover himself popped up at 4pm for a 30-minute chat with Jon Sopel. ‘I’m so grateful to everyone for hanging about
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The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, and his four deputies submitted themselves to a public grilling last Tuesday. The State of London debate was chaired by James O’Brien and broadcast live on LBC. ‘I will endeavour to speak as little as possible,’ quipped the garrulous radio host who maintained his line of larky, locker-room banter
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The Glass Menagerie directed by Jeremy Herrin is a bit of an eyeball-scrambler. The action takes place on a huge black platform flanked by 1930s antiques: a typewriter, a broken piano, a reel-to-reel tape recorder and a smattering of Anglepoise lamps. This cryptic setting suggests that the play is being developed in a Museum of
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A tasty duel at PMQs today. The party leaders were absent and their understudies, Dominic Raab and Angela Rayner, traded insults across the dispatch box. Their styles are polar opposites. Raab is laconically deadly. Rayner is brashly entertaining. And their sartorial choices reflect their different approaches. She wore a chic white frock offset with black
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The Old Vic’s new show, Jitney, has a mystifying YouTube advert which gives no information about the play or the characters. If the producers paid for the marketing themselves, they’d do a better job. The advert fails even to mention that ‘Jitney’ is Pittsburgh slang for ‘taxi’ and that the action is set in a
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In the theatre, to boo is taboo. There was an exception last week when Andrew Lloyd Webber’s name was booed by the crowd at the final performance of his musical Cinderella after a letter written by him to the cast, in which he called the show a ‘costly mistake’, was read out on stage. But
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It’s tomorrow, isn’t it? The deadly hammer blow that ends Boris’s career will be delivered by voters in the crucial Yorkshire and Devon by-elections. But hang on. The deadly hammer blow was supposed to fall two weeks ago when he narrowly survived the no-confidence vote. Then again, the hammer blow was due to knock him
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Harry Hill’s latest musical traces Tony Blair’s bizarre career from student pacifist to war-mongering plaything of the United States. With co-writer Steve Brown, Hill has created a ramshackle, hasty-looking production that deliberately conceals the slickness and concentrated energy of its witty lyrics, superb visuals and terrific music. The last thing it wants to seem is
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Last week, Sir Keir was monstered by his critics after a feeble performance at PMQs saw him he fail to trouble a wounded Boris. Even his closest allies were in despair. ‘Put some more welly into it,’ advised his deputy Angela Rayner. Today we saw Sir Keir transformed and unleashed. He was flinging wellies in
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Dictating to the Estate is a piece of community theatre that explains why Grenfell Tower went up in flames on 14 June 2017. The abandoned block stands, like a cenotaph, a few minutes’ walk from the social club where the show is presented. The local council never cared much for Grenfell’s 120 families. Plans to
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PMQs started with a bump. The Speaker called Dame Angela Eagle whose tone was acidic but quietly conversational. ‘This week’s events demonstrated just how loathed this Prime Minister is,’ said the dame. ‘And that’s only in his own party.’ A decent gag that won big laughs – and not just from the opposition. But Boris
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Shakespeare’s Globe has a new wheeze to popularise its shows. The latest production, Henry VIII, is supported by a seminar about racism in this late play which the Bard co-wrote with John Fletcher. The online event, hosted by the Globe’s Dr Will Tosh, features dramatist-in-residence, Hannah Khalil, and Mira Kafantaris, a critical race theorist from
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Some things are done well in the Globe’s new Julius Caesar. The assassination is a thrilling spectacle. Ketchup pouches concealed inside Caesar’s costume explode bloodily with each dagger blow and the conspirators are doused in dripping scarlet gore. During the assault, Caesar fights back and very nearly survives. Highly realistic. Afterwards, his statue is toppled
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The House of Shades is a state-of-the nation play that covers the past six decades of grinding poverty in Nottingham. The action opens in 1965 with a corpse being sponged down by an amusingly saucy mortician. The dead man, Alistair, sits up and walks into the kitchen where he natters with his prickly, loud-mouthed wife,
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PMQs was a warm-up today. The main event was Boris’s response to Sue Gray’s partygate report. Boris’s body language was sheepish as he sat through PMQs. He hunched in his place, head down, legs crossed, his meaty arms enclosing his ribs in what psychologists call a ‘self-comforting’ gesture. He was giving himself a bear-hug. Sir
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Last night’s must-see TV show was Bury Boris – the Movie. In anticipation, the BBC released a trailer for a Panorama edition about parties in Downing Street. It’s a thrilling two-minute watch. It opens with a shot of a dodgy skinhead in a sleazy overcoat being released from Wormwood Scrubs. Or is it an international
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Hampstead’s latest play is a knotty rape drama by Naomi Wallace set in Kentucky. Four teenagers with weird names meet in a hired basement. Hoke and Frayne are boys. Jude is a girl whose younger brother, Acton, gets bullied at school. Their chat is aggressive, cynical and funny. Jude boasts that she’s already lost her
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It’s half-time in the Beergate versus Partygate contest. The current score, nil-nil, would suit both leaders perfectly. The economy dominated PMQs. Unemployment, boasted Boris, has reached its lowest level since 1974. Great news. But inflation is at a peak last seen in 1982. Slow-footed Sir Keir didn’t mention that. He pushed Labour’s pet-project, a windfall
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‘I fink I doan luv yew any maw.’ A marital bust-up drama at the National Theatre opens with a whining Cockney, Maggie, telling her City whizzkid husband Gary that their relationship is over. Gary and Maggie are aspriring underclass types who’ve achieved bourgeois prosperity: John Lewis kitchen, vintage wine rack and a ceramics collection. They
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The title of the Donmar’s new effort, Marys Seacole, appears to be a misprint and that makes the reader look twice. Good marketing. The show is a blend of Spike Milligan-esque sketches and indignant speeches about race but it starts as a straightforward historical narrative. Mary Seacole enters in Victorian garb and introduces herself as
