Lloyd Evans

Lloyd Evans

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

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

A man of many parts

From our UK edition

‘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

From our UK edition

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

From our UK edition

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

From our UK edition

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

From our UK edition

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

From our UK edition

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’

From our UK edition

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

From our UK edition

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

From our UK edition

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

From our UK edition

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

From our UK edition

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

From our UK edition

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.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Losing the plot

From our UK edition

The Sanctuary Lamp Arcola, until 3 April Eigengrau Bush, until 10 April Furore fever still obsesses Irish playwrights. In Edwardian times there was nothing like a good old riot at the Abbey Theatre to get a new work established as a classic. Luvvie lore is replete with tales of mass walkouts and punch-ups at Dublin premières where the fisticuffs invariably end with the house being stormed by Sinn Fein while W.B. Yeats leaps on to the stage to appeal for calm and the Polish ambassador gets stabbed with a hat pin. Tom Murphy’s 1975 drama, The Sanctuary Lamp, seeks the rowdy affirmation of this tradition.

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Not the main event

From our UK edition

Cameron was scarcely trying at PMQs today. Show up, look a bit cross, slip in a joke or two, then sit down and wait for the Budget. That was his plan. When the PM offered his congratulations on BabyCam, the opposition leader quoted a text he’d received – ‘How do you find time for these things?’ Making this wisecrack seemed more important to him than attacking the PM. His tactics were odd, out of touch, retrospective. He asked about Brown’s attempts to conceal the evidence that, as chancellor, he flogged the nation’s gold too cheaply and blew vast sums in potential profits. Brown’s bungling over the bullion billions should be a promising issue.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Gothic caricatures

From our UK edition

Love Never Dies Adelphi, booking to October The Fever Chart Trafalgar Studio 2, booking to 3 April Love Never Dies has been bugging Andrew Lloyd Webber since 1990. He felt that the Phantom of the Opera needed a sequel and he’s been working on it for roughly three times as long as it took Tolstoy to write War and Peace. The script assumes no knowledge of the earlier show. Christine, an unhappily married French diva, is offered a singing contract by a mysterious maestro who runs a theatre in Coney Island. She arrives with her husband and son and discovers that the maestro is none other than the obsessed Phantom himself. The ensuing love triangle is marred by the bizarre psychological distortions of the characters.

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Miracle at SW1

From our UK edition

He did it. We saw him. It actually happened.  History was made at PMQs today as Gordon Brown finally gave a direct answer to a direct question. Not only that, he admitted he'd been wrong about something. Tony Baldry (Con, Banbury) informed the PM that his assertion before the Chilcot Inquiry that defence spending has risen, in real terms, every year has been contradicted by figures released to the Commons library. Up got Brown, looking like a wounded old teddy-bear, and offered this epoch-making concession. 'I accept that in one or two years real terms spending did not rise.'   What a union of opposites. Brown and the truth. It was alarming, almost unnatural, to witness. Like Santa in a scuba suit or the Pope playing pinball.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Sister act | 13 March 2010

From our UK edition

Private Lives Vaudeville, until 1 May Party Arts, until 13 March This isn’t right. This can’t be happening. She’s over 50. Quite a bit over. In fact, she’s 53 and she’s playing the 29-year-old heroine in one of the finest comedies in the repertoire. And she’s doing it in London. And she isn’t even English. What possessed Kim Cattrall to imagine she could play Amanda in Private Lives? The answer turns out to be, supreme self-possession. From her first entrance, her starry grace communicates itself to the entire auditorium. The age question resolves itself straight away. She appears half-naked in a bathrobe. Her soft bare arms are plump and tanned and show none of the sinewed graininess of the gym or the bench press.

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Tornado in the chamber

From our UK edition

It was like a volcano going off. At PMQs today Cameron was calmly dissecting the prime minister’s underfunding of the Afghan war when he quoted two former defence chiefs who’d called Brown ‘disingenuous’ and ‘a dissembler’. Then someone shouted, ‘they’re Tories!’ Cameron lost control. Instantly, completely. His temper just went. White in the face, he leaned his flexed torso across the dispatch box, hammering at it so hard that it nearly disintegrated. ‘Is that it?’ he yelled. ‘Is that what this tribalist and divisive government thinks of those who serve this country!?’ Rippling with anger he demanded that the PM dissociate himself from his backbenchers’ smears.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Great Scot — a triumph for Vettriano!

From our UK edition

Every year the cream of Scotland comes to Boisdale of Belgravia to celebrate Scottish talent and to toast the winner of the Johnnie Walker Blue Label Great Scot award. Boisdale is quietly opulent. The mighty banqueting tables and blood-red walls decorated with country views suggest baronial splendour in a modern key. It’s Balmoral with central heating. Our host, Andrew Neil, began on a note of unapologetic patriotism. ‘Scotland invented the modern world,’ he said, and reeled off a list of his homeland’s greatest contributions to world culture. Tarmac, television and Tennent’s Super didn’t get a mention and instead he focused on ‘the decimal point, the cure for scurvy and the patron saint of Ireland, St Patrick.

Lloyd Evans

Inner beauty

From our UK edition

Ghosts Duchess, until 15 May Off the Endz Royal Court, until 13 March Ghosts is the most Ibsenite of all Ibsen’s plays. In a sub-Arctic backwater two pairs of lovers pursue doomed romances while outside it drizzles constantly. Oswald can’t marry his mother’s serving-girl because his brain is being attacked by syphilis. Meanwhile, Pastor Manders’s ardour for Mrs Alving is smothered by his inflexible Calvinistic ideals. And outside it’s still drizzling. The external plotting of this great emotional thriller is unusually clumsy. Early on we’re told, in very specific terms, that a brand-new orphanage (made entirely of wood and not covered by buildings insurance) is being overseen by a notoriously clumsy carpenter who drinks too much.