Lloyd Evans

Lloyd Evans

Lloyd Evans is The Spectator's sketch-writer and theatre critic

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Loving Hattie

The unthinkable has happened. I’ve started to admire Batty Hattie’s performances at PMQs. Her career may be over, her party may be trashed, her movement may drift leaderless, and her colleagues’ reputation may have been shot to pieces but Hattie always turns up and gives it everything. Nature has not overburdened her with talent. She can’t count. She can hardly speak. She reacts to events about as quickly as a self-timing oven but she has epic quantities of pluck. Every week she pounds out into the surf, like a battleship equipped for the last war but two, and heads for the centre of the fray where she refuses to sink under the heaviest fire.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Theatrical wizardry

The Late Middle Classes Donmar, until 17 July Lilies of the Land Arts, until 17 July Plotless plays are usually the work of beginners or nutcases. Very occasionally they’re produced by seasoned theatrical wizards. Simon Gray belongs to the third type. The Late Middle Classes is an absorbing and often hilarious portrait of the buttoned-up English bourgeoisie of the 1950s. Celia and her pathologist husband Charles have pitched up in Hayling Island but they can’t wait to swap its provincial torpor for the glamour of London. Their big move is dependent on their son Holly’s ability to get a full scholarship to a public school.

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Hark! A human at the dispatch box

After years of fury and rancour in the chamber, the mood at PMQs was sober and rational today. (Personally, I hope it hots up again soon but the armistice certainly made a change). Under no pressure whatever, Cameron roamed at will over the full spectrum of government policy and gave intruiging hints about future priorities. Tory backbencher Philip Davies urged him to cancel the subscriptions of 4000 convicts signed up for Sky TV. The PM didn’t seem bothered by this. They may not get the vote but they’ll carry on getting Adam Boulton. Cameron is more concerned by the 40 percent of prisoners who celebrate the end of their sentence by committing another crime.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

‘Take risks and be exciting’

From our US edition

Lloyd Evans talks to Michael Attenborough, whose star at the Almeida is the theatre itself The back office of the Almeida Theatre in Islington could do with a major refit. Dowdy, open-plan and scattered with Free-cycled furniture, it looks like the chill-out room of a student bar or the therapy suite of some underfunded weight-watch clinic. The tin chairs are arranged around elderly coffee-tables. The walls have been painted with the ramshackle expediency of a squat — a blue stretch here, some scarlet columns there, a few purpley flourishes. Beneath the roof eaves a beer gut of damp and crumbly brickwork bulges outwards precariously. I’d give it three months, maybe six, before it collapses.

Lloyd Evans

Miller masterpiece

All My Sons Apollo, booking to 2 October Shrunk Cock Tavern, until 12 June It starts softly, in a dream of American contentment. A country house nestles in the lap of its lush and blossoming garden. The sun shines. Birds sing. Green foliage drips with the rain from last night’s storm and Joe Keller, a prosperous manufacturer in his early sixties, potters about the lawn reading the newspaper and cracking jokes with his neighbours. His son Chris has returned home and plans to marry Ann, the girl next door. But there’s a snag. In fact, there are two. Ann was engaged to Chris’s brother, a navy pilot who went missing in the war a couple of years earlier.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Reality deficit

Ingredient X Royal Court, until 19 June Canary Hampstead, until 12 June In the old days the Royal Court knew that the best way to entertain local millionaires was to stage plays that wallowed in distress and squalor and featured four crack addicts in a squat stabbing each other to death with infected needles. Things changed under Dominic Cooke, who introduced a lighter touch and brought wit, intelligence and a sense of fun to the theatre. But nostalgia is back. The Court has revived its crack-house quartet formula in Nick Grosso’s new play, Ingredient X. The setting is a London high-rise. There’s no plot. The action concerts the attempts of two characters to overcome their enthusiasm for alcohol and powders while the other two booze merrily away.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Religious skirmish

Love the Sinner Cottesloe, until 10 July Ditch Old Vic Tunnels, Waterloo Approach Road, until 26 June Bickering vicars at the National. A new play by Drew Pautz invites us to consider whether the Church should ordain gay clergypersons. It’s a paradox that an organisation run by men in skirts is so vexed by the prospect of admitting homosexuals to their club. Pautz’s play neatly dramatises this contradiction in the person of Mike, a Protestant lay volunteer, who has a fling with a rent boy while attending a conference in Africa. The rent boy follows Mike home, claims sanctuary in his local church and compels him to help with his asylum claim.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Lexical trivialities

A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky Lyric, Hammersmith, until 5 June Counting the Ways Oval House The Lyric theatre in Hammersmith has an eccentric approach to the dearth of writing talent. Unable to find a good playwright, it has commissioned three bad ones to showcase their talentlessness in a single work. One assumes that the three men were jesting when they described their collaborative method as ‘writing scenes on rolls of wallpaper and passing one pen between us’. Or maybe they were being candid. The play is flawed at every level. Narratively, the script is so dense that the drama can never achieve lift-off. Four brothers must meet and be reconciled before the fifth brother, suffering from cancer, expires.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

A man of many parts

‘Heroin?’ I say to Simon Russell Beale. ‘Sorry?’ he says. ‘To relax after a show. To come down off the high. You take heroin?’ ‘Oh yes, yes,’ he says. ‘Yes… if only. Well, as you can probably tell from my shape I like my beer. I can’t imagine a performance without a pint or two afterwards.’ ‘Which brand?’ ‘Oh cheap stuff. Stella or Export, yes, cheap as chips, cooking lager.’ The man widely regarded as the finest theatrical talent of his generation has surprisingly simple tastes.

Lloyd Evans

Harmless fun

Dirty White Boy: Tales of Soho Trafalgar Studio 2, until 22 May Holding the Man Trafalgar Studio 1, until 3 July Blogs and blogging, bloggers and bloggery. What’s it all about? At first sight blogomania looks like an entirely new literary form. A second glance reveals that it’s the oldest genre of the lot: oral history. A few years back, Clayton Littlewood opened a menswear shop in Soho and when business was slow he amused himself by writing an internet journal about the loafers and oddballs who popped in for a cigarette and a moan. Blog became book. Book became play. The material is rather like the novelty jockstraps Littlewood sells to passing woofters: it’s harmless fun and there’s not much of it. The characters preen and mince in predictable fashion.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Travel narrows the mind

The holiday season is upon us, but it’s nothing to celebrate, says Lloyd Evans. Tourism is torture, no matter how you do it Oh God. Here it comes again. The days lengthen, the temperature climbs, the pollen spreads and the mighty armies of foreign invaders prepare to make their move. It’s not illegal immigrants who cause my heart to sink at this time of year. Those brave defectors deserve our admiration for their persistence and ingenuity. They travel here in conditions no westerner would tolerate. They cling upside down to the exhaust pipes of juggernauts. They squeeze into the drums of imported washing machines. Unlike casual holiday-makers they’re serious about this country. They’re here to learn English, find a job, raise a family, get sick and die.

Lloyd Evans

Tangled threads

Women Beware Women Olivier, in rep until 4 July Hair Gielgud, booking until January 2011 Women Beware Women deserves a subtitle: spectators beware seldom revived classics. Thomas Middleton’s 1622 play is set in the duke’s court at Florence, where greed, lust, incest and the hunger for power are running rampant. Middleton is much admired, little adored. He’s one of those dramatists who sends actors, directors and literary professors into rhapsodies but who doesn’t attend to the basics of entertainment. There’s no central character in this play just a grand human theme, corruptibility. He wraps up the script in great cobwebby entanglements of interrelated storylines.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Send in the clowns

Counted? County Hall, until 22 May The Real Thing Old Vic, until 5 June Voting is so irrational as to qualify as an act of religious devotion. The process involves a fabulous confluence of approximations. Candidates offer a pattern of promises. Voters select the pattern that most closely meets their needs. And though there may be only the barest overlap between the needs and the promises, the voters maintain a belief that their choice carries influence even after it’s been diluted in the choices of millions of others. It’s a miracle anyone votes at all. A new verbatim play, Counted?, examines our attitudes towards the process.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Porn and propaganda

Porn — The Musical Theatre 503, until 1 May Posh Royal Court, until 22 May Here’s the rule. Provocative title equals lousy show. The playbill Porn — The Musical filled my heart with misgivings as I made the long trek south of the Thames to a venue at a Battersea boozer. The room above the pub was huge and empty, but the theatre wasn’t here but higher up, via a trapdoor, wedged in under the beery roof-eaves. A fug of lavender and sawdust hung over the creaking benches and the stage was the size of a card-table. As I took my seat, a furry insect expired in midair and landed in the retro hairstyle just ahead of me. A moth in a beehive. Then the show began and everything perked up.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Spectator debate: ‘Pity Cameron’s a Heath not a Thatcher’

Last week’s Spectator debate — ‘Britain’s in decline again. Pity Cameron is a Heath not a Thatcher’ — looked at the nature of a future Tory government under David Cameron. Last week’s Spectator debate — ‘Britain’s in decline again. Pity Cameron is a Heath not a Thatcher’ — looked at the nature of a future Tory government under David Cameron. Proposing the motion, Simon Heffer surprised everyone by launching into a warm tribute to Ted Heath. ‘A serious talent’, Heath had been hobbled by a ‘terrible desire to let the state take control’. In office he demonstrated a fatal ‘flexibility of principle’.

Lloyd Evans

Our squandered national treasure

Torn with grief, Melvyn Bragg has produced a condolence book for the South Bank Show (born 1978, died of neglect, 2010). These 25 vignettes, based on the best of his interviews, are more than just the cosy clippety-cloppety sounds of an old cowboy trotting into the sunset. They offer intriguing comments on the film-making process and present valuable new insights into their subjects. Most have the shape and phrasing of short stories and his meetings with the gravest maestros read like mini-epics. We watch plucky little Melvyn as he approaches the armoured titan in his lair, tempts him forth and charms him into dropping his guard. He meets Francis Bacon at 9 am and finds six bottles of champagne waiting on the table, one open.

Lloyd Evans

Rotten truth

The Empire Royal Court, until 1 May Polar Bears Donmar, until 22 May The Royal Court’s stuffy little upstairs theatre is hosting a new play about cultural imperialism. D.C. Moore sets his scene in Helmand where a young English corporal finds himself morally compromised by his desire to torture a Taleban prisoner. The twist is that the prisoner is a norf-Lunnin geezer, of Asian extraction, claiming to have been kidnapped by insurgents while ‘holidaying’ in Kandahar. This device neatly brings the war back home and turns the play into an examination of the competing religious factions in Britain. And though the script is never less than absorbing, and often very funny too, it takes a while to hit cruising speed and the plot lacks complexity.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Triumphant pursuit

London Assurance Olivier, in rep until 2 June Bedroom Farce Duke of York’s, booking to 10 July Trickster nature has been maliciously kind to Simon Russell Beale. It made him the leading actor of his generation and instilled in him a desire to perform Shakespeare’s awesome roll-call of warrior princes. It also built him like a chest of drawers. His physique has always hampered his Shakespearean outings, so it’s a great relief, and a pleasure, to see him on the stage of the National in a role that complements every last bauble in his dazzling thesaurus of effects. London Assurance, a slapstick comedy, was written in 1841 by a 20-year-old playwright, Dion Boucicault.

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Last orders | 7 April 2010

The choppers, and the whoppers, were flying at Westminster today. David Cameron invited the prime minister to try a spot of accountability at PMQs. Would he admit that he scrimped on transport aircraft in Helmand? Brown, with breathtaking cheek and not a little rhetorical dexterity, flipped the question upside down. ‘I do not accept that our commanding officers gave the wrong advice,’ he said and insisted that he never sent underequipped troops into battle. He clarified this with a smokescreen. ‘I take full responsibilitiy but I also take the advice of our commanding officers.’ Here was the morality of the restaurant freeloader, accepting the food but passing the bill down the table. Cameron leapt on it. ‘That answer sums up this premiership.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Suicide note

The Gods Weep Hampstead, until 3 April Mrs Warren’s Profession Comedy, booking to 19 June Finding fault with Shakespeare is one of the RSC’s favourite activities. It’s now so fed up with King Lear that it has decided it needs to be scrapped and rewritten. A tall order? Not a bit of it. The company maintains a team of ‘embedded’ writers whose talents rival those of the bard, more or less, and Dennis Kelly has been given the tiresome but necessary job of correcting the faults of this famously ill-written drama. Kelly’s previous works — Debris, Orphans, Osama the Hero, and Our Teacher’s a Troll — give some hint of his artistic range. He likes controversy, violence and macabre humour.