Lloyd Evans

An all-Hall haul this week. Sir Peter directs his daughter Rebecca in Twelfth Night at the National. This traditional and very fetching production opens in a sort of Elizabethan rock-star mansion where Orsino (Marton Csokas) lounges on a carved throne, in Lemmy locks and Ozzy cape, intoning the play’s gorgeous opening lyrics. Then the plot begins. There’s a she who dresses as a he and falls in love with another he who sends her to another she who loves the she who’s dressed as a he. Did you follow that? Don’t worry. Later, up pops another he who’s identical to the first she and they all get married. The audience is rarely at ease with any of this.

Gently does it. The Fitzrovia Radio Hour takes us back to the droll and elegant world of light entertainment in the 1940s when the airwaves were full of racy detective shows and overheated melodramas about pushy Yorkshiremen and rogue Nazis. The show is set in a radio studio during a live performance and we watch the actors rattling through their scripts while scurrying here and there to provide the effects for an exceptionally complex soundtrack. Cabbages get walloped with machetes to suggest stabbing. A game of billiards is done with some doorknobs being chinked together. A melon gets squished to represent the sound of a horse having its head chopped off. It’s a neat idea.

It’s that time of year. The great reckoning is upon us. Insurance is being renewed. Tax returns are being ferreted out. Roofing jobs are being appraised and budgeted for. And spouses are being trundled into central London for the annual session of dialysis at the theatre. It’s that time of year. The great reckoning is upon us. Insurance is being renewed. Tax returns are being ferreted out. Roofing jobs are being appraised and budgeted for. And spouses are being trundled into central London for the annual session of dialysis at the theatre. And here to meet them is Ayckbourn’s yuletide comedy Seasons Greetings, which features three hilariously miserable families bickering their way through the festival of ill-will. Ayckbourn is the Christmas blow-out of dramatists.

Deceptively attractive. Romeo and Juliet tempts directors and leads them on while keeping all its false doors and secret pitfalls out of view. Rupert Goold’s RSC production is two fifths good and three fifths indifferent. A respectable score. This lovely, tricky and rather silly play isn’t the work of a genius but of a jobbing apprentice with a careless, or perhaps ambitious, sense of what could be managed on stage. Goold adds a spot of extra bother here and there, overusing the balcony, bunging Arabic music into the masque ball, and botching the costumes. Spectacular irrelevance seems to be his guiding principle. The street brawls are enlivened by whooshes of flame surging up from beneath the boards like an oil-rig blow-out.

His brain clouded with opium fumes, Jean Cocteau wrote Les Parents Terribles in just one week. It opens like a Greek tragedy crossed with a madcap sitcom. The ageing beauty Yvonne prances around her Bohemian apartment pining and weeping for her son, Michael, who has gone missing. When he turns up safe and sound, she throws herself into ecstasies of relief, leads him to the chaise-longue and showers his face and lips with kisses. He then breaks the news that he’s in love with a typist. She reacts like a cobra touched with a cattle prod. Spitting with anger she denounces the ‘lying hussy’, and vows never to let an intruder steal away her happiness and leave her to die neglected and unloved.

Christmas approaches. And kitchens and playrooms across the land resound with the joyous tinkle of little Josephs and Marys rehearsing their roles in the Nativity play. My four-year-old son, making his debut in a farmyard cameo, has just one line, ‘I’m a donkey and I’m very tired,’ which he repeats endlessly to the delight of his beaming dad. So I can only imagine the levels of pride surging through the families of Ciara Southwood and Madison Lygo as they prepared for the lead roles of Mimi and Janey in the Royal Court’s new play Kin, which is set in a girls’ prep school. The homes of these lucky ten-year-old actresses will have echoed with the play’s exquisitely turned dialogue. ‘Lazy shit,’ says Janey.