Lloyd Evans

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.

Juno and the Paycock is a slice of documentary realism from the earliest years of the Irish Free State. The skint Boyle family are living like a gang of hobbits in the leprotic ruins of a grand Dublin townhouse. The paint blisters and peels. Diseased mortar crumbles into scabby flakes. The plaster-work centrepiece on the ceiling is like a charred meringue the size of a cartwheel. It’s grim. Money’s tight, food is scarce. Everyone’s depressed. There’s no work. The pride of the family, young John Boyle, would probably give his right arm to get a job if it hadn’t been blown off during the civil war. Then a glimmer of hope. Cap’n Jack Boyle inherits a small fortune from a forgotten cousin. Hooray! The happy times are here. The Boyles go bananas.

It’s the usual old muddle. You take a Shakespeare classic and you time-travel it to an alien century, usually the present one, which has no connection with its historic setting. The plan, we’re always told, is to generate that supremely irrelevant attribute, ‘relevance’. Director Dominic Cooke has fast-forwarded The Comedy of Errors to modern London and I have to confess it works extremely well. For once, it’s OK to have wrong-era costumes and juggled chronologies and a visual setting that’s out of whack with the literary context because Cooke is simply mimicking Shakespeare. The Bard nicked a Roman favourite, The Menaechmi of Plautus, and dolled it up in the culture and lingo of London’s red-light district, Southwark.

It’s a palace drama with all the trimmings. Trevor Nunn’s new production, The Lion in Winter, plunges us into the court of Henry II and his spurned wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, as they struggle to decide which of their three sons should inherit the throne. Eleanor, held prisoner in a deluxe royal fortress, has been granted leave to join the family at Christmas. ‘Thanks for letting me out,’ she says, on their first meeting. ‘It’s only for the holidays,’ jokes Henry. Clearly a king who locks his wife in the broom cupboard won’t pay much heed to her views on the succession. So there’s an emotional and dramatic illogicality here right from the start. And, right from the start, the playwright couldn’t give a stuff. Which helps.

‘I’m off to see a play about a man who kills his dad,’ I told my five-year-old as I left the house. ‘Because he didn’t give him any ice-cream?’ he said. Mmm, I wondered, it’s possible that Hamlet harboured some childhood grudge against Claudius over a Mr Whippy refusal episode. But such meta-textual speculation is extremely perilous. And when I reached the Young Vic I realised just how grave the danger can be. Ian Rickson’s bumptious show sets the play in a loony bin. Banana yellow walls. Tannoy announcements. Leering staff wearing canvas security uniforms. Claudius, in a three-piece suit, setting chairs in a semi-circle for Hamlet, Gertrude and the court. Visually this is clear enough but narratively it creates disorder.

I take no pleasure in saying this but the director of the National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner, appears to have lost his sense of propriety. Or possibly the balance of his mind. He’s asked John Hodge (author of the Trainspotting screenplay) to write a sitcom about the Great Terror. And, rather than bunging it in the nearest skip, Mr Hytner has decided to direct it at the Cottesloe. The blood-stained gag-fest begins in 1938 when a secret policeman orders Russia’s leading satirist, Mikhail Bulgakov, to write a play about Stalin’s early life. Bulgakov meets the Great Leader and Teacher and finds him keen to assume personal control of the scriptwriting. So Bulgakov takes over Stalin’s day job, running Russia. This inspires many hilarities in the horror-slapstick genre.

Long may it lie in ruins. Wilton’s Music Hall, in the East End of London, is a wondrous slice of Victoriana which exploits its failing grandeur to the max. All visitors are implored to find a couple of quid for the restoration effort. But decay and dilapidation are the best things about it. Every wrinkled façade, every petal of tarnished gilding, is like a tear shed for an age that will never return. It’s wonderful. The administrators have realised this, too. Ruination is their main selling point. The cover of the brochure shows a heart-rending image of the terracotta entrance flaking and declining beautifully. If the renovation campaign were to find enough loot for a proper facelift, the place would go bust overnight. No one wants a squeaky-clean music hall.