Lloyd Evans

Calling all thespians. Roll up, you theatre folk. The Hampstead’s new show is a dramatic love-in you can’t afford to miss. Farewell to the Theatre introduces us to Harley Granville-Barker, one of the greatest playwrights of the early 20th century, as he enjoys a sabbatical in Massachusetts in 1916. Everything is languid, atmospheric and high-minded. Granville-Barker is busy giving lectures and watching American productions of Shakespeare while one of his chums, a literature professor, has had a bust-up with another academic. It’s a pity this off-stage conflict doesn’t test or expose Granville-Barker at all. He just lolls around the garden of a country house making cold, lofty speeches about the theatre and generally being a didactic pest.

Strange sort of classic, Hay Fever. Written when Noël Coward was an unknown actor, it won him no converts among producers. He couldn’t get anyone to stage it. The title is weak and vague. The script lacks incident and action. And the humour is more subtle than audiences were used to. Only after Coward had broken through with his auntie-blasting Oedipal shocker, The Vortex, could he find managers ready to take a second look at his back catalogue. Hay Fever introduces us to a family of maddeningly self-indulgent Bohemians, the Blisses, whose home is swamped by a quartet of weekend guests. A gruesome house party follows. All the wrong people flirt with each other. A few hasty kisses and some overfrantic proposals ensue. Then everyone leaves and the Blisses carry on as before.

Joy of joys. Huge, fat, inebriating doses of adulation have been squirted all over Josie Rourke’s first show as the châtelaine of the Donmar Warehouse. It’s a breakthrough production in many ways. You have to break through the treacly tides of critical approval. Then you have to break through the Donmar’s overenthusiastic heating system, which sends unwary play-goers to sleep long before their bedtimes. Finally you have to break through the script — The Recruiting Officer by George Farquhar, one of those neglected classics that everyone agrees is marvellous and no one bothers to read. Hardly surprising. We’re in Herefordshire in 1706.

As a human, Maria Callas was a diva. As a musician, she was a divinity. In the early Seventies she came down from Olympus to share her wisdom with us mortals and gave a series of open classes at the Julliard in New York. These seminars inspired Terrence McNally to create a full-scale portrait of opera’s greatest star. The play opens as a biting slice of character comedy as Callas inflicts her brand of ‘coaching’ (i.e., character assassination) on three wannabe soloists. It’s amazing. She’s back. The legend walks the earth again in all her gorgeous and contradictory coloration. She’s exacting, brilliant, charming, shy, arrogant, needy, fragile, evasive, fiery, frigid, miserable, exuberant. She’s magnificently paranoid and heroically lonely.

An outbreak of heritage theatre at the National. She Stoops to Conquer, written by Oliver Goldsmith in 1773, is the ultimate mistaken-identity caper. A rich suitor woos his bride-to-be while under the impression that the home of his future in-laws is an upmarket inn. Boobs and blunders multiply until love triumphs and harmony is restored. This is marshmallow drama. Nothing is required of the audience but immobility and the occasional polite chortle. Jamie Lloyd’s handsome production gets virtually everything right. The sets by Mark Thompson are five-star stunnahs. The 18th-century drawing room, with a baronial mantelpiece and a fireplace big enough to roast an ox, will please the most avid property-porn addict. The exterior forest scene is extraordinarily lovely.

Miles Bullough of Wallace and Gromit creators Aardman Animations on the pressure to move jobs abroad Shaun the Sheep is at the meeting too. I walk into the office of Miles Bullough, head of broadcast at Aardman Animations, and find him sitting opposite a four-foot model of the ovine superstar. I’m offered a seat, and an assistant comes in with refreshments. Tea for me, coffee for Bullough. Nothing for Shaun, whose sombre and kindly face is poised inquisitively over my tape-recorder. ‘Shaun was the star of A Close Shave,’ Bullough tells me, ‘which was Nick Park’s third film. [It was also the third film to feature perhaps Aardman’s most famous characters, Wallace and Gromit.] That was a breakthrough moment for Aardman as a studio.

A year late but worth the wait. Last year’s centenary of Terence Rattigan’s birth brought two excellent revivals of lesser-known works, Flare Path and Cause Célèbre, to London. But the playwright’s personal story remains a subject of uncertainty and guesswork. Giles Cole’s little gem of a play, The Art of Concealment, brings the dramatist’s secret history to life. Rattigan complained that to outsiders his success seemed quite effortless. In fact, his whole career was a fluke. After dropping out of Oxford without a degree, the young wannabe was given an ultimatum by his boorish, womanising father: succeed as a playwright or take a job in the Foreign Office. Rattigan failed. Every play he sent out came boomeranging back by return of post.