Lloyd Evans

Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi is a complicated organism. The action starts in southern India where we meet a precocious teenager, Piscine, who tells his parents that he wants to be known as Pi. The family own a failing zoo and they buy a Bengal tiger to attract fresh customers. The new arrival promptly rips the head off Pi’s pet goat and eats it. Next they take a ship to Canada, with the zoo stowed in the luggage hold, but the vessel hits stormy weather. The beasts break out of their cages and start to eat each other. And when the ship sinks, Pi finds himself on a life raft alongside an orangutan, a zebra with a broken leg, and the Bengal tiger. These spectacular scenes are tricky enough for a novelist to describe but to put them on stage seems an act of madness.

World-class sex bomb Janie Dee stars in a fabulously silly revival of the American comedy Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike. She plays a movie diva, Masha, who loves to flaunt her wealth in front of her mousy sister and bookish brother. Striding into the family home with her long hair flying and her scarlet lips curling, she narrows her eyes and flings shafts of desire in all directions. Then she arches her neck and tosses back her head to give her bust an extra half-inch of uplift. A stunning display. The show is about three middle-aged siblings whose over-intellectual parents named them after characters in Chekhov plays. Vanya is a hopeless dreamer.

Mike Leigh’s classic, Abigail’s Party, has been revived under the direction of Vivienne Garnett. The script is a guilty secret for middle-class types who like to sneer at those beneath them but who can’t express their shameful feelings openly so they watch Mike Leigh instead. The only sympathetic character, Susan, is a well-bred gal who arrives at the party with a bottle of red wine which Beverly puts in the fridge. Red wine in the fridge! How hilarious. Offered a gin or a Bacardi and Coke, Susan asks for a sherry, which Beverly doesn’t stock. A drinks cabinet with nothing but gin and Bacardi! What a bunch of barbarians. Next they’ll be saying ‘lounge’ instead of ‘sitting-room’.

Let’s be honest. Jane Austen is popular because War and Peace doesn’t fit inside a handbag. Austen’s best-loved novel, Pride and Prejudice, has been updated in a fetching new production that treats the sacred text as a screwball comedy. The fun starts before curtain-up with the cast of five girls messing about on stage and struggling with a chandelier that almost shatters but doesn’t. This improv bit is irritatingly predictable. Then the show begins and the girls start to curse, laugh and pontificate their way through the tale. We get a feminist lecture explaining that Mrs Bennet’s predicament owes itself to the laws of bequest that prevented women from inheriting property. So if Mr Bennet dies, his wife and five daughters will be destitute.

’night, Mother is a two-hander that opens like a comedy sketch. ‘I’m going to kill myself, Mama,’ says Jessie. She’s cleaning a pistol and loading it with bullets. ‘I’ll shoot myself in a couple of hours.’ The pair live together in a lonely farmhouse, and Jessie wants to make sure her mother will be able to cope after her death. She tours the kitchen explaining where the fuses and the cleaning materials are kept. Mama, who doesn’t seem unduly alarmed, offers to phone her son and get him to thwart the suicide attempt. ‘I’ll just have to do it before he gets here,’ says Jessie. This is an intensely dramatic set-up which ought to be either gripping or hilarious, or both. Somehow it lacks punch.

Scenes from the Grenfell Inquiry is a gripping, horrifying drama. Nicolas Kent and Richard Norton-Taylor have sifted through the public hearings and dramatised the most arresting exchanges. Ron Cook, often miscast as a comedian, is superb as the frosty and occasionally irascible inquisitor, Richard Millett. Early on, he asks the witnesses ‘not to indulge in a merry-go-round of buck-passing’. Later, he comments acidly, ‘That invitation has not been accepted.’ Every witness has something to hide and something to be ashamed of. A fireman searching for a child on the upper floors can’t explain why he didn’t rouse families from their flats and help them escape. A witness describes the inferno’s ghastly noise, ‘like sparklers’.

Yaël Farber’s Macbeth sets out to be a great work of art. The director crams the Almeida’s stage with suggestive props, glass panels, microphones, a wheelbarrow full of jackboots. The witches are not the usual vagrants or carbuncled mystics. These grim-looking ladies have expensive hairdos and nicely ironed shirts — like a panel of disgruntled academics at a tribunal. William Gaunt is a decrepit Duncan who looks ready to receive his telegram from the Queen. He can barely rise from his NHS wheelchair. But one wonders why this frail old chap had to be knifed to death? Much easier to smother him with a pillow and claim he expired naturally.