Lloyd Evans

The Antipodes, by the acclaimed dramatist Annie Baker, is set in a Hollywood writers’ room. Seven hired scribblers are brainstorming a new animated feature under the direction of a mysterious, bearded multimillionaire, Sandy, who seems thoroughly bored with the movie-making process. The script is in its early stages and Sandy decrees that the central character must be a monster. That’s all. The writers can fill in the details. He asks them to indulge in a free-association experiment by describing their first sexual encounter or the scariest moment in their lives. Long speeches follow. Very long, some of them. Sandy loses interest in the project, not surprisingly, and starts to absent himself from the room. The writers toil on, chatting and wittering.

The Royal Court is the theatre’s answer to Islamic State, a conspiracy of nihilists fascinated with death, supported by groups of self-flagellating puritans, and committed to inflicting pain on all who stray into its orbit. The latest fatwa from Sloane Square concerns the imminent demise of the Welsh language — an emergency for which there seems to be scant evidence. On Bear Ridge by Ed Thomas proclaims its amateurish origins with stage directions that belong in Pseuds Corner. ‘Spindly winter branches dance on a fading sign,’ is Thomas’s attempt to create a ghostly mood. The setting is a derelict village shop where ‘ancient bluebottles cling to death on sticky brown fly-catching strips’.

No power on earth can stop Lungs from becoming an international hit. Duncan Macmillan’s slick two-handed comedy reunites Matt Smith and Claire Foy from The Crown. It’s short (90 mins), it has a minimalist set (‘arty’), and it makes no intellectual demands on the crowd (phew!). Best of all, it parrots all the ecological prejudices currently supported by today’s urban bourgeoisie. Matt and Claire play a broody couple who fear that having a child will destroy the planet and kill billions of their fellow earthlings. Their voluble anxieties persist for 40 minutes and become a little tiresome for those blessed with long memories.

Athol Fugard likes to dump his characters in settings with no dramatic thrust or tension. A prison yard is a favourite. He specialises in bored, talkative characters who squirt the time away swapping memories and indulging in bursts of creative play-acting. It’s dull to watch but good fun to perform. Thesps love to step out of character and road-test a range of fictional personalities. ‘Master Harold’… and the boys is classic Fugard. We’re in an empty restaurant in South Africa in 1950. Lunch service has ended. Two waiters twiddle away the afternoon discussing sex, ballroom dancing and beating women (as if this were a standard feature of male behaviour). Enter the boss’s school-age son, Hally, whom both waiters know well.

The Man in the White Suit, famously, is a yarn about yarn. A brilliant young boffin stumbles across an everlasting polymer thread but when he tries to profit from his discovery he faces unexpected ruin. There are only three beats in the story — breakthrough, triumph, disaster — so it needs to be elaborated with some skill. Writer/director Sean Foley does a superb job of making the gaps unnoticeable. He aims for the farcical texture of a pantomime and he opens the story in a cheery northern pub where working-class men and women sit around as equals, sharing pints of ale. Rather a fanciful view of 1950s England but never mind. We move to the factory where Sidney, a clumsy Cambridge graduate, muddles his way through various madcap experiments.

Michael Frayn’s backstage comedy, Noises Off, is the theatre’s answer to Trooping the Colour. Everyone agrees that it’s an amazing display of synchronised choreography but does anyone actually want to see it? Yes, to judge by the press-night crowd at the Garrick. The joint was packed. The show opens at the dress rehearsal of a bedroom farce where an incompetent actress, Dotty Otley, is listening to advice from an exhausted but infinitely patient director. She worries that she hasn’t got her lines right. A lot of them ‘had a very familiar ring’, the director assures her. The gentle wit of these passages is soon overtaken by physical antics as the production encounters endless technical snags. Cues are missed. Props go astray.

Caryl Churchill is back at the Royal Court with a weird collection of sketches. The first is set on a mantelpiece where a clock, a vase, a statuette and a plastic dog discuss their lives. These ornaments morph into human teenagers. One is a lad who wants to die after being raped by his father. His girlfriend tries to comfort him but she’s harassed by two nasty bullies. These four youngsters have perhaps created alter egos as household ornaments in order to block out their nightmarish lives. Somewhat opaque. In sketch two, a young chap seated on a cloud summarises the storyline of Aeschylus’s Oresteia in a glib and knowing manner. He treats every act of violence as an amusing in-joke. This monologue will mean little to those unfamiliar with the original.

Tony Hawks’s musical, Midlife Cowboy, has transferred from Edinburgh to the Pleasance, Islington. At press night, the comedy elite showed up (Andy Hamilton, Angus Deayton, Caroline Quentin, Alistair McGowan) to see Hawks playing a songwriter, Stuart, whose marriage is on the rocks. To revive his love life, Stuart puts his wife in charge of the country-and-western club they jointly own, and the story follows the travails of their in-house band as they seek glory in a local talent contest. The cast, led by Hawks, are skilful musicians with oodles of charm but the narrative is short of high stakes and surprises. The script might be punchier. Sample gag: Stuart reacts to a proposal he mistrusts. ‘I’m like a native American. I have reservations.

Lynette Linton opens her stewardship of the Bush with a drama about racial and sexual bigotry. Four British women decide to start a girl band but only one of them, Yomi, happens to be straight. The script mixes confessional monologues with bitchy interactions over kitchen suppers. Beth, whose parents are West Indian, once dreamed of living in suburban bliss with ‘a little concrete garage for my car’. She named her imaginary children ‘Pauline, Graham and Amanda’. But when she embraced black culture she threw out her Dostoevsky novels and her Dire Straits albums and invested in jazz-funk records and the works of Toni Morrison instead. Anyone with a lifelong allergy to Dostoevsky or Dire Straits will applaud this wise decision.

Hansard is the debut play by actor Simon Woods, who enjoys a deep knowledge of his subject. The characters are a middle-aged couple, the Heskeths, who occupy ‘a country house in Oxfordshire. Georgian. Good bones. Not large’. The year is 1988 and Robin is a busy Tory MP whose wife Diana has realised that she loathes the Conservative party and all its doings. ‘They talk a good game,’ she says, ‘but they’re unbelievably dangerous.’ As a lifelong leftie, she has even started begging strangers to vote against her husband, whose policies ‘inflict damage on the most vulnerable in society’. She also suspects him of philandering and has taken to appearing unannounced at his London flat. Robin shares his wife’s talent for invective.

The Secret River opens in a fertile corner of New South Wales in the early 1800s. William, a cockney pauper transported to Australia for theft, receives a pardon from the governor and decides to plant a crop on 100 acres of Aboriginal land. His doting wife, Sal, begs him to take her and their young sons back to her beloved London. They make a deal. William must succeed as a farmer within five years or pay for their passage home. He clashes with a tribe of spear-waving Aboriginals who make it clear that they want him off their ancestral turf. Neither side speaks the other’s language. ‘This is mine now. You lot can have the rest,’ says William, pointing vaguely at Australia.