Lloyd Evans

Another Country was an instant response to Anthony Blunt’s exposure in 1979 as a Marxist spy. Julian Mitchell set out to explain how gay public-school toffs, reared in a system of hypocrisy and backstabbing, could betray their country. At a time when Soviet communism was a potent and growing menace, this issue grabbed play-goers by the throat. Today’s audiences will find different sources of topicality. The school system itself seems rather admirable and idyllic, if a little rough around the edges. The play could almost be a YouTube advert for Eton. All that’s missing is the ethnic kaleidoscope. There are no Indian or Chinese pupils, no Sikh bodyguards patrolling the grounds, no Filipino food-tasters tentatively sipping the turtle broth of a Saudi dauphin.

I Can’t Sing! is a parody of The X Factor, which already parodies itself at every turn. Quite a tough call. The heroine is an oppressed no-hoper stuck in a tiny caravan under the Westway with her crippled dad who lives in an iron lung. She longs for a chance to win stardom and wealth on a TV talent show. So this is the Cinderella story with a lot of grotesque and absurd modern detailing. Is it good? No. It’s spectacularly brilliant. A hit musical needs to get everything right and this one does just that. The sets are lavish and sumptuous. The costumes are razor-sharp parodies of underclass loser-wear. The title song has a soaring climax that tugs at the heart-strings and fills the spirit with strange and unexpected yearnings. Some reviewers have found the show cruel.

There’s a problem, as we all know, with female roles in the theatrical canon, and it reaches all the way back to the Bard. Shakespeare’s women lack the richness and variety of his male characters. Modern theatre practitioners have tried all kinds of ploys to correct this imbalance. Next month the RSC launches a season of dramas, Roaring Girls, written during Shakespeare’s lifetime and featuring women in pivotal roles. This is bound to reopen the question of Shakespeare’s approach to women and their subordinate position in his work. It’s easy to argue that Shakespeare’s art simply reflects his habitat. Wealth, freedom and influence were the preserve of men, so he tended to leave women on the sidelines.

Here’s a great idea for a play. Turn the polygamy principle upside-down and you get a female egoist presiding over a harem of warring husbands. Sharmila Chauhan’s drama, The Husbands, introduces us to a pioneering sex maniac, Aya, who founds a commune in India where women take as many spouses as they fancy. Aya herself has three blokes on the go and is about to get married again.  Curtain up and we meet her pre-existing husbands, Sem and Omar, who get along together very nicely. Both are childishly besotted with Aya. Which is also nice. Anticipating the arrival of husband number three, the hubbies quietly vacate the bedroom and start preparing a wedding feast. Lovely. For the characters, at least.

What’s the quickest way to create a hit musical? Base it on a bestselling book. The writers of The A-Z of Mrs P have done just that. But they’ve chosen the wrong book. You twits. You need to pick a popular novel, not the London street directory. The main character, Phyllis Pearsall, spent years trudging the pavements of the capital creating her catalogue of 23,000 streets. In this show, the character of Mrs P, a posh and self-contained bumpkin, proves dramatically inert. The writers seem to have twigged that she’s a dud, so they’ve turned their attention to her uppity Hungarian father and his sozzled Irish wife. But these two yield no rewards either. He’s a shouty nuisance and she’s a whimpering wreck.

Interesting times at Soho Theatre. One of its outstanding shows of last year, Fleabag, was an offbeat Gothic love story written by and starring Phoebe Waller-Bridge. The director of Fleabag, Vicky Jones, has penned another offbeat Gothic love story. And it stars Waller-Bridge. The action plunges us into the weird, manipulative love life of beautiful Jo and her slick older lover Harry. Up goes the curtain and they’re copulating to porn while sharing a bag of Cheesy Wotsits. Harry’s old flame Kerry bursts in and announces that she’s been raped. Harry and Jo console her, rather perfunctorily, and then use her distress to start swapping cynical, sneering accusations about their own relationship. Already, the audience is gripped.

Tracy Letts, of the Chicago company Steppenwolf, has written one of the best plays of the past ten years. August: Osage County is an exhilarating, multilayered family drama whose sweep and power amazed everyone who saw it on stage. His 2008 play, Superior Donuts, has a smaller, cosier canvas. We’re on the north side of Chicago in a doughnut bar run by an ageing hippie named Arthur. Yes, doughnuts. In a world seized with dietary paranoia, this long-haired old dreamer is trying to peddle wheat-based, starch-ridden, gluten-crammed, sugar-encrusted spheres of death. That’s Arthur in shorthand, stodgy and moribund. His donkeyish life is perked up by the arrival of Franco, a chatty young black dude, who needs a job and a publisher for his novel.

Here it is. Fifty years late. Oh What a Lovely War was originally staged at Stratford East in 1964. It returns to its birthplace to cash in on this year’s anniversary of the Great War. Sorry, I meant commemorate. The title is so familiar that one overlooks its callow, misanthropic glibness. Does anyone think war ‘lovely’? The show’s narrator sprints through the causes of the conflict, and its chief battles, without offering any historical insight. Music-hall songs and comedy stereotypes trundle past on a conveyor belt of laughter and slaughter. The show was inspired by angry dogmatist Joan Littlewood, who wanted to sock it to R.C. Sherriff for writing a hit play, Journey’s End, that overlooked working-class infantrymen.

Sochi 2014 is the least wintry Winter Olympics ever. Yes, there’s a bit of downhill shimmying going on in the slalom. And a few figure skaters are pirouetting around the rink. Midair daredevils, with their feet lashed to planks of bendy plastic, are performing spectacular twirls and somersaults and crashes. And there are speed freaks on tea trays racing down ice-packed gulleys in tribute to the Hadron Collider. But the real action is off-piste and off-chute. It’s a political grudge match. Two implacable foes are angrily denouncing each other as shameful and perverted barbarians. The Hope Theatre’s verbatim drama, Sochi 2014, taps into this febrile mood with a documentary history of gay Russia since the collapse of the Soviet empire. At first all was rosy.