Lloyd Evans

I’m not the biggest fan of Neil Simon, I admit it. In the programme notes for The Sunshine Boys, I discovered that Time magazine once called him ‘the patron saint of laughter’. Good, I thought. When the curtain goes up I’ve got someone to pray to. The show opens with Danny DeVito slumped in a hotel room watching TV in mid-afternoon. He’s a spent vaudeville star whose feud with his comedy partner forced him into retirement 11 years earlier. His nephew, a pushy young agent, wants to revive the famous duo for one last TV special. DeVito insists that he won’t do it. (But he will, of course.

If you want to see Scotland’s superiority complex in action, take a look at its literary culture. The works of Hume, Boswell, Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson adorn libraries the world over, and it suits Scotland’s arts lobby to pretend that the age of excellence is still alive. It’s great PR and it justifies the mighty wodges of tax-payer dosh that fund new writing north of the border. But when you seek out the latest Jock geniuses you find someone called David Harrower. Familiar name? Maybe not, but then he’s better known abroad than at home. His most celebrated play Blackbird, written in 2005, told of a child-rape victim who met up with her molester 15 years later and found the stirrings of lurvve still tingling in her loins. Yeah, sure.

We all know the ‘excellence theory’ of migration. Barriers to entry guarantee that imported cargoes have outstanding qualities. Manfred Karge’s parable of urban despair in the Ruhr comes to the UK with high expectations. It’s been here before. Director Stephen Unwin premièred the play at Edinburgh, 1987. His new revival at the Arcola demonstrates that the ‘false charm theory’ of migration also applies. The foreign and the exotic can mesmerise us more easily than the homegrown. Unwin sets the play in some vague tower-block ghetto. We meet a quartet of jobless alcoholics who become fascinated by Amundsen’s trip to the South Pole. By impersonating Norwegian explorers, the drunken lunks briefly discover some purpose in their sozzled lives.

Lloyd Evans talks to the young, dynamic and much-in-demand Tom Scutt about the challenges of bringing to life Narnia and its inhabitants Barky? What does he mean, ‘barky’? We’re talking about Aslan and he says he’s aiming for ‘barky’. ‘Barky like a dog or barky like a tree?’ ‘Like a tree,’ says Tom Scutt, designer of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which opens on 8 May in Kensington Gardens. ‘What I often do with Rupert [Goold, the director] is to imagine setting the whole show in one location. In this case, the wardrobe. So you trace the wood of the wardrobe back to a tree and Aslan has a link with a tree, something honest and true and majestic. That felt right.

Be still, at last, you clamouring brainboxes. Those who long for more highbrow drama in the West End can thank God for David Edgar’s Written on the Heart. Commissioned by the RSC, this celebratory play tells the story of the King James Bible, which was first published in 1612. Making scripture accessible to the masses represented a huge moral and cultural upheaval. In 1536 William Tyndale had been executed in Flanders for translating the Bible into English, but just eight decades later the king himself ordered a new vernacular version and showered the translators with rewards. Edgar is no slouch when it comes to taking on lumpish, glutinous topics and he relates the entire story of the English Church during the 16th century.

Once you grasp the essential triviality of the Olympics, the Cultural Olympiad falls perfectly into place, says Lloyd Evans. Even Shakespeare can’t escape Once you grasp the essential triviality of the Olympics, the Cultural Olympiad falls perfectly into place, says Lloyd Evans. Even Shakespeare can’t escape Funny business the Olympics. No one seems to want it. Clearly it doesn’t belong here or anywhere else. So what’s it for? The main athletic competitions — ‘track and field’ — are disciplines devised by Greek hill-farmers during the Iron Age to improve their skills in battle. The field events, like discus and javelin, teach you to throw heavy and/or pointy things at your enemy.

John Webster had one amazing skill. He could craft lines that glow in the memory like radioactive gems. ‘A politician is the devil’s quilted anvil; he fashions all sins on him, and the blows are never heard.’ Eliot loved him. Pinter used to stroll around the parks of Hackney shouting his soundbites into the sky. But Webster never discovered how to put his highly wrought lines into the mouths of likable or captivating characters. The Duchess of Malfi is a Jacobean slasher-play, a straight-to-video Tarantino blood-fest, full of cloaked assassins and scheming dukes. We’re in an Italian court where a beautiful noblewoman, played by Eve Best, has fixed her eye on a handsome young bumpkin.