Lloyd Evans

Anthony Neilson is an Arts Council favourite known for trivial but impenetrable plays with off-putting names like The Wonderful World of Dissocia. His latest effort has another hazard-warning instead of a title. Unreachable starts with an actress auditioning for a dystopian sci-fi movie set in a clichéd future. She lands the role and we cut to the film-lot where more clichés await. Pretentious director Max is furious because the sun won’t stay in one place and he decides to ditch his digital cameras and film instead on old-fashioned celluloid. The shoot is suspended while producers scrabble around for emergency funding. This self-involved storyline would be unbearable if it weren’t for the charming whimsicality of Matt Smith as Max.

Does anyone believe Brian Friel’s libellous blarney? He portrays Ireland in the 20th century as an economic basket case where the starving, the retarded, the crippled and the widowed offer up prayers to a heartless God who responds by heaping their burden ever higher. Friel is popular with British mainlanders who are tickled by the news that their Atlantic coastlines are peopled by picturesque barbarians and suicidal drunkards mired in exquisitely revolting dereliction. You’ll notice that aid agencies use the same technique, and for the same audience, when they portray Africa as a rough and ready paradise where life is organised around the latest borehole dug by a team of gap year Norwegian pole vault champions.

Mike Bartlett’s curious blank-verse drama Charles III became an international hit. His new effort examines the cut-throat world of dark-web espionage. An American traitor named Andrew (Edward Snowden presumably) is hiding out in a Moscow hotel. Enter a flirty, giggling Irishwoman played by Caoilfhionn Dunne, who claims to be British and who teases Andrew over his betrayal of his homeland’s secrets. She evinces an interest in Oscar Wilde and the pair lock horns over footling minutiae. Andrew points out that Barbie dolls are called Sindy in the UK and this seems to demonstrate his familiarity with Britain. But he fails to spot the false cadences of her accent and he doesn’t query her use of the strange term ‘British Metropolitan Police’.

When Richard III’s bones were unearthed in a Leicester car park, Frankie Boyle suggested the headline ‘Bent royal found at dogging hotspot’. Rupert Goold opens his version of the play by restaging the 2012 excavation as if to inform us that the past and the future are held together by something called time. That glib gesture apart, this is a superb production whose modern-dress aesthetic works, just for once, extremely well. And it works because the costumes are dark, sober and unornamented and this visual restraint moves our attention upwards to the more fertile arena of the face. And what a face Ralph Fiennes has, all meat-cleaver and calculation: the haughty forehead, the deadened eyes, the mistrustful mouth petering out at the edges, the dominant, jeering brow.

Gauche, perhaps, to complain about Aladdin but it slightly deserves it. The terrific Genie opens the show and then disappears for 45 minutes while the plot is explained. My squirmy ten-year-old kept whispering Aladdin-related trivia at me in order to occupy himself as the rags-to-riches storyline was laid out in far too much detail. Visually the show is impressive, despite minor flaws. The rangy architectural sets are intricate confections of teetering filigree but they look a little factory-fresh and unlived-in. Behind them the daylight skies are wrongly composed of a single hue (only the night sky has a single hue).

Bertolt Brecht took The Threepenny Opera  from an 18th-century script by John Gay and relocated it to Victorian London. This National Theatre version wants to straddle the contemporary and the antique. Mack the Knife, an Afghan war veteran who murders strangers, contracts a bigamous marriage with Polly Peachum, the daughter of a cross-dressing mastermind who runs begging gangs across east London. This laborious set-up takes an hour to establish and the drama gets started only when Polly’s mum vows to rub out Mack at a knocking-shop. A wise dramatist would have placed this threat in the opening scene. But Brecht isn’t a wise dramatist; he’s a preachy one and his purpose is to show that all human sin derives from the profit motive.

Out come the stars in Kenneth Branagh’s Romeo and Juliet. He musters a well-drilled, celebrity-ridden crew but they can’t quite get the rocket off the launchpad. The stylish setting evokes Italy in the early 1950s. The girls wear New Look frocks and the boys sport tight slacks and shirtsleeves. Christopher Oram’s muted set has bland marble walls and tasteless squared-off pillars like a modern dictator’s palace on the Euphrates. A rare failure. Romeo is played by Game of Thrones inmate Richard Madden, who seems a handsome enough specimen, but Branagh might have asked him to act with his soul rather than his forearms. And he looks too mature.

If there were an Eddie the Eagle award for theatre — to recognise large reputations built on minuscule achievements — it would go to the Royal Court. Sixty years ago the English Stage Company arrived at ‘the Court’ determined to amaze the world with a new generation of thrusting young geniuses. It won instant notoriety with John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. This sour bedsit melodrama earned the noisy support of a cabal of reviewers led by Kenneth Tynan who used it to advertise their powers of artistic foresight. Osborne’s next play, The Entertainer, was a cheerless and cumbersome allegory of Britain’s imperial decline, which lacked even the merit of prophecy. It was just a dramatised rehash of the previous decade’s headlines.

The Globe’s new chatelaine, Emma Rice, has certainly shaken the old place up. It’s almost unrecognisable. Huge white plastic orbs dangle overhead amid plunging green chutes like rainforest vines. The back wall is smothered in a blinding rampart of explosively coloured saffron petals. Up top, partially concealed by pillars, lurks a rock band togged up in a blend of Elizabethan casuals and modern gear. Presiding over everything is an Indian matriarch, seated in cross-legged solemnity, playing an electric sitar whose headstock (the bit with the tuning pegs) resembles a Fender bass. What are we supposed to make of this weird, druggy, space-age Bollywood mash-up? Nothing much. Except that Shakespeare belongs now, and then, and here and there, and everywhere.

T.E. Lawrence is like the gap-year student from hell. He visits a country full of exotic barbarians and after a busy few months rescuing them from their spiritual frailties, and helping them emulate their Western superiors, he returns home and never stops boring on about it. ‘How much I learned from them,’ he gushes, when what he means is, ‘How much they learned from me.’ That’s always been the view of Lawrence’s critics, among them fellow British army officers, who saw him as a reckless, attention-seeking fantasist. Howard Brenton’s new play offers a more charitable portrait of Lawrence as a brilliant, sensitive, rootless genius. The action opens with him newly enlisted as a flunkey in the RAF under the surname ‘Ross’.

Great excitement for play-goers as a rare version of a theological masterpiece arrives in the West End. Doctor Faustus stars Kit Harington, a handsome, bearded bantamweight with round glasses and rock-star curls. We first meet him wearing a grey hoodie and lounging in a bedsit surrounded by cheap Catholic statuary. The druggy clothes and the religious iconography suggest a criminal Jesus-freak, possibly of Mexican origin, hiding out from cocaine dealers. Marlowe’s creation is somewhat different. Dr Faustus is a medieval potentate, a scholar of genius, a rich and celebrated German polymath admired by emperors and cardinals, who decides to exchange his earthly ambitions for the chance to wield supernatural powers for 24 years. But hell awaits him when the contract expires.