Lloyd Evans

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.

Some of the marketing efforts by amateur impresarios up in Edinburgh are extraordinary. I was handed a leaflet for a poetry show called Don’t Bother. I didn’t. Tony Slattery appears in Slattery Will Get You Nowhere (a good pun that advertises the content), in which the ageing comic takes the audience back to the 1990s. In those days he was a handsome, clever, charismatic wag who suffered from an excess of self-regard. Now he’s a grizzled, ramshackle presence, jowly and ill-shaven, like a forgetful pensioner on his way to the day centre. He starts his show with a lot of banter about wine but he doesn’t drink on stage. Alongside him sits a friendly interviewer who guides him through the rougher bridleways of his anecdotes.