Lloyd Evans

Clybourne Park Royal Court, until 2 October Tiny Kushner Tricycle, until 25 September Bash the bourgeoisie is a game the Royal Court likes playing and I’m always keen to join in. Bruce Norris, a brilliant American satirist, delighted us a few years back with The Pain and the Itch, a hilarious exposure of middle-class hypocrisy. Clybourne Park is a pair of plays set in a house in the prosperous Chicago suburbs. We start in the 1950s when black families are just arriving in the neighbourhood. We then fast-forward 60 years and see prosperous whites returning after decades of poverty and neglect. The earlier play feels very wonky. The dice are overloaded against the whites. As well as their black servants, they have a deaf friend and a kid next door with Down’s syndrome.

In the Blood Finborough, until 4 September Zelda Leicester Square Those who oppose state-funded theatre in Britain sometimes imagine that America, with its far smaller subsidised sector, is spared the sort of pious, jokeless, grind-yer-nose-in-it plays which our handout theatres use to punish audiences for the sin of being affluent. But American theatre turns out to be richly contaminated with underclass miserablism too. Suzan-Lori Parks is a supreme purveyor of the goods and, like many second-rate talents from minority backgrounds, she’s been given more prizes than Chekhov. She’s won the Pulitzer. She’s been nominated for a Tony.

The Great British Country Fête Bush, until 14 August The Great Game: Afghanistan, Part 1 Tricycle, until 29 August Russell Kane, a rising star of stand-up, has penned a musical satire with an inflammatory theme. His play opens in a Suffolk village where the locals have risen up against Tesco’s attempts to blight the community with a thumping new shopping hub. Excellent subject! Rabid, thoughtless expansionism by supermarkets inspires rage in every corner of the country (apart from London, which couldn’t care less). After this superb set-up, the show goes wrong immediately and stumbles off in search of easy targets, facile rustic caricatures — the randy vicar, the gay farmer’s boy, the thick ferret-fancier, the racist lady from the WI, and so on.

Don’t knock daytime TV, says Lloyd Evans. It may be mindless and banal, but it is entertainment in its purest form It’s happening right now. I just had a flick-through and it’s all going on. You wouldn’t believe it. A Labrador called Pongo has been squashed by a tractor and is having his broken paw fixed at the vet. A grandmother from Dartford is trying to raise funds for her daughter-in-law’s wedding by auctioning a trunkload of heirlooms. And Mandy and Oona (in the blue), are hoping to make a bigger profit at the car-boot sale than Vaughan and Sanjay (in the red). It’s gripping stuff, take my word for it.

Welcome to Thebes Olivier, in rep until 18 August La Bête Comedy, booking to 4 September My mind didn’t just boggle. My whole body did. Every sensory organ joined in the process — ears, eyes, nose, teeth, tongue. All boggled. Even my left shoulder started boggling at one point, although this turned out to be the oscillating snuffles of my neighbour as he dozed serenely against my arm. The source of these disturbances was Moira Buffini’s reconfiguration of Sophocles’ Antigone, which is currently chasing its tail around the Olivier. The setting is a hyper-muddle. We’re in Thebes, a failed third-world state, where kids armed with machine guns strut about the place jabbering in the gangsta patois of east London.