Lloyd Evans is The Spectator's sketch-writer and theatre critic
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Bad 24 hours for Mrs May. A last-minute Christmas shopping-trip to Europe yielded no bargains whatever, even though she had £39bn to splurge on an extension to her premiership. Back home she found a conspiracy of seditious Tories baying for her resignation. The Queen of Narnia is a masochist. She finds punishment stimulating, and perhaps
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One of the biggest stars of the 1970s was the professional lard-bucket Mick McManus, who plied his trade as an all-in wrestler. The sport was televised to millions. The parents of the playwright Michael McManus must have calculated that by giving their child the same name as ‘The Dulwich Destroyer’ they would subtly galvanise his
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Huge ructions at PMQs. Ian Blackford, of the SNP, said Mrs May had been ‘misleading the house inadvertently or otherwise’ over her EU agreement. Instant panic. Roars of outrage at the suggestion that the prime minister had lied. Mr Speaker snapped to his feet. The house paused while he delivered his ruling which centred on
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I know nothing about Patricia Highsmith. The acclaimed American author wrote the kind of Sunday-night crime thrillers that put me to sleep. Her best-known creation, the suave psychopath Thomas Ripley, has spawned a number of films that I’ve carefully avoided. But ignorance is an ideal starting point for Switzerland, by Joanna Murray-Smith, a brilliantly nasty
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As their time draws near, doomed leaders like to have a final go on the train-set. Mrs May entered this state of self-absorbed hyperactivity about a week ago when she started to push and yank at all the levers of power in Downing Street. Honours were handed out. Jets were commissioned to zoom her between
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Michelle Terry, chatelaine of the Globe, wants to put an end to penis-led Shakespeare by casting women in roles intended for men. To showcase her war on male cronyism she presents a version of Macbeth starring Paul Ready as the king. She plays the queen. In real life the two are married. This must be
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Amber Rudd, a washed-up ex-minister last week, is the de facto Brexit secretary today. She revealed her loyalties this morning when she told an interviewer that parliament wouldn’t approve a no-deal agreement. And with no deal off the table, Brussels can dictate terms. Congrats Amber. The Légion d’honneur is on its way. And a peerage
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Pinter Three appeals to opposite poles of the play-going spectrum. The birdbrains like me will enjoy the music-hall sketches while the goatee-strokers will have fun pretending that Pinter’s deadly earnest memory plays are worth seeing. Watching the first piece, Landscape, is like receiving a jigsaw puzzle in instalments. Two characters, Duff and Beth, speak to
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Today’s choice for ‘A Book At Bedtime’ is the government’s draft Brexit deal. At daybreak the masterpiece was being referred to as a 500-page tome but its estimated length has now risen to 540 pp. That explains why the PM looked so calm and unruffled and at PMQs. No MP is going to risk brain
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Lauren Gunderson’s play I and You opens in the scruffy bedroom of 17-year-old Caroline. Lonely, beautiful and furious, she’s unable to participate in school life owing to a chronic liver problem. Into her hideaway barges Anthony, a handsome geek, who wants her to help with a Walt Whitman project. Caroline tries to chase him off
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In the year since it opened, the Bridge has given us the following: a harmless Karl Marx comedy by Richard Bean; a modern-dress Julius Caesar with Ben Whishaw playing Brutus as a frowning existentialist; a dreary rustic soap opera written by newcomer Barney Norris; and an enjoyable NHS romp by Alan Bennett. Not quite the
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The leaders played austerity tug-of-war at PMQs today. Is it over yet? Yes it is, said Theresa May. Not for years, said Jeremy Corbyn. Back and forth they went. Eventually they’d swung around 180 degrees and swapped positions. Corbyn seemed to want more austerity. May seemed thrilled that it was finished – a policy that
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Two beliefs obsess the Remain cause. First, that voters were lied to during the referendum campaign. (Questionable). Second, that the negotiations are being botched. (Indisputable). But while Remainers believe that their opponents are fibbers, they can’t see that they too are being misled. At the People’s Vote rally last Saturday, I found general acceptance of
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Stories by Nina Raine is a bun-in-the-oven comedy with a complex back narrative. Anna, in her mid-thirties, had a boyfriend 12 years younger than her but the relationship died just as Anna was ready to sprog. Aged 38, and desperately broody, she needs to get preggers pronto. We join her on a Sperm Quest. Though
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Mrs May survives. That’s the sensational news from today’s PMQs which was conducted in a remarkably sedate and leisurely atmosphere. The Tory leader came under little pressure from Jeremy Corbyn. And she got no grief at all from her own back-stabbers, sorry, back-benchers who seem to have decided to delay her dethronement until Hallowe’en, or
From our UK edition
Two beliefs obsess the Remain cause. First, that voters were lied to during the referendum campaign. (Questionable). Second, that the negotiations are being botched. (Indisputable). But while Remainers believe that their opponents are fibbers, they can’t see that they too are being misled. At the People’s Vote rally last Saturday, I found general acceptance of
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Sir David Hare’s weird new play sets out to chronicle the history of the Labour movement from 1996 to the present day. But it makes no mention of Corbyn, Momentum, the anti-Semitism row or rumours of a breakaway party. The drama is located in the dead-safe Miliband era and it opens with talk of a
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A strange PMQs. Usually the session is dominated by honking throats and empurpled faces. Today there were interesting facts and useful opinions. Amazing! An expertly briefed Jeremy Corbyn put Theresa May on the spot by noting that she’d omitted to say ‘Chequers’ in her conference speech or during recent performances in parliament. So is it dead? No,
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Pinter Two, the second leg of the Pinter season, offers us a pair of one-act comedies. The Lover is a surreal pastiche of married life. A suburban housewife has a paramour who visits her daily while her husband is at work. The husband knows of his rival and discusses his wife’s infidelity as if it
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Golden sunshine streamed across Westminster at noon. And Jeremy Corbyn wiped away the cheer as soon as he stood up at PMQs. Performing his sad-sack routine, he grouched his way through six questions about ‘painful austerity’. Theresa May wants Scrooge replaced by Lady Bountiful in the corridors of Whitehall. But it hasn’t happened, grumbled the
