Lloyd Evans

Mother Courage and Her Children Olivier Speaking in Tongues Duke of York’s Mother Courage, Brecht’s saga of conflict and suffering, is set during the Thirty Years’ War. The title character is a maternal archetype who ekes out a perilous existence selling provisions to the warring factions and chasing off the recruiting sergeants who want to lure her children into the army. Deborah Warner’s wrong-century production announces its intentions early. At curtain-up we know nothing of Courage except that she has ‘lost a son’. And here she comes, aboard her famous cart, wearing sunglasses, bawling into a microphone while cavorting to the sound of an on-stage rock band like the saddest groin-thrusting granny at Glastonbury.

The Shawshank Redemption Wyndham’s Othello Trafalgar Studios All change at Wyndham’s. The wayward sophistication and creative adventure of Michael Grandage’s first West End season has drawn to a close and been replaced by a karaoke version of The Shawshank Redemption. Smart move. Cameron Mackintosh, the theatre’s owner, must be hoping that this stale piece of air guitar will sharpen our appetite for Grandage’s return in 2010. The Shawshank copycat, directed by Peter Sheridan, has been cast with lookalikes in the Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman roles, reinforcing the impression that the priority is to cook up a comfort-food replica and not upset the punters with unfamiliar tastes. It’s a maddeningly average concept.

Punk Rock Lyric Hammersmith Judgment Day Almeida In rolls another bandwagon. And who’s that on board? It’s Simon Stephens, the playwright and panic profiteer, who likes to cadge a ride from any passing controversy. His latest play is about a teenage psycho who enacts a gory shoot-out at his local school. What a strange choice. Stephens frets vociferously in the programme notes about Britain’s ‘distrust’ and ‘marginalisation’ of its youngsters. With an episcopal air, and a peculiar turn of phrase, he asserts his ‘continuing faith’ in the young. ‘They get stuff. Sometimes they may lack the vocabulary always to articulate that which they understand but I have faith that they often understand it.’ (He used to be a teacher.

Fathers Inside Soho Too True to be Good Finborough Oh, great. It’s one of those. Fathers Inside is a workshop-based outreach project directed by an actor/facilitator. Those last nine words encircle my heart like the clammy fingers of death. But the play is a surprise and offers a big, warm, manly handshake. It starts quietly. Seven young convicts on a drama course are getting to know each other. The atmosphere is steeped in hostility and male aggression. The dialogue feels ragged, conversational, obvious, boring even. And it’s not so much under-rehearsed as unrehearsed. This is deliberate. Life is unrehearsed, and this play’s amazing air of naturalism gradually sidelines your doubts and beguiles you into believing the actors are real people.

The Assault/The Last Days of Gilda Old Red Lion Eye/Balls Soho London in August. It’s the capital’s sabbatical. Theatre is all Edinburgh right now and the London-bound play-goer feels dislocated, irrelevant almost, alienated by accidents of chance and inclination, like a Hebrew at Christmas, a teetotaller on St Patrick’s day, an honest man in the Labour party. There’s still theatre to be had, though. The hunger remains, the unappeasable ache. A Brazilian double bill catches my eye. When it comes to Brazilian theatre — and I come to Brazilian theatre often — I’m more than an enthusiast, I’m a proto-fanatic. My expectations are vast. My sense of anticipation is beyond measure.

Edinburgh is a flashers’ convention. Edinburgh is a flashers’ convention. Everyone wants exposure. They come to build their brand, to raise recognition levels among the oblivious, to smuggle themselves into your brain while you’re not looking. So don’t feel obliged to buy a ticket. Your attendance is sufficient reward. Performers know the fringe is a gamble and they risk only what they can afford to lose: most of August and most of their savings. If you want comedy you’ll find numerous free venues listed at freefringe.org.uk. The best of these, by some distance, is The Canon’s Gait located at the lower end of a road known to the entire world — apart from the fringe map, which calls it ‘High Street’ — as the Royal Mile.

Lloyd Evans goes in search of culture on the rain-soaked streets of Edinburgh The crunch. That damn credit crunch. It hurt Scotland hardest of all. A worldwide reputation as a financial powerhouse? Gone. Dreams of independence? Severely truncated. Last year the Edinburgh Festival bore prophetic signs of imminent poverty, of homelessness, of doom. Free shows abounded. Bribes of wine, whisky and sandwiches were being proferred to choosy punters. This year I’m here on an austerity awayday, a recession quickie, a pared-down and stripped-back three-day in-and-outer. My accommodation meets the brief superbly. I’m in a dive, of the deep-sea variety. You have to hold your breath. The showers are communal. So are the loos. There’s no lift, not even one that’s broken.

A Streetcar Named Desire Donmar Too Close to the Sun Comedy Kissed by Brel Jermyn Street Streetcar opens with a strange spectacle. Christopher Oram’s lovely — too lovely — design has the upper circle decked out in peeling ironwork which soars across the boards and modulates into a chic spiral staircase overlooking the Kowalski’s open-plan apartment. This Manhattan-loft gesture exposes the impossibility of making the Donmar’s airy spaces look like a cramped one-bedroom flat in the wife-beating district of New Orleans. The grime, the physical claustrophobia are missing from Rob Ashford’s production but these are the only failings in this fabulous, horrible, thrilling, galling, hair-pricklingly uncomfortable show.

Lloyd Evans celebrates Tennyson’s miraculous musicality ‘He had the finest ear of any English poet,’ said W.H. Auden. ‘He was also, undoubtedly, the stupidest.’ This famous jibe aimed at Tennyson (whose bicentenary falls on 6 August) is revealing in its shrill and almost triumphant bitchiness. Every age rejects the one before and it’s no surprise that Auden, a gay, left-wing, pacifist democrat, was keen to advertise his contempt for the uxorious, High Church, monarch-loving imperialist. But the severity of his scorn and its blatant falsehood (Tennyson knew half a dozen languages and was famed for the brilliance of his conversation) suggest that Auden’s real feelings may have been more complex than he liked to admit.

Spike Milligan’s Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall Hampstead The Black Album Cottesloe Good old Spike. Wonderful, charming, innocent Spike who could skewer authority with a child’s unthinking acuity. ‘Where were you born?’ asked the recruiting sergeant when he was conscripted. ‘India,’ said Spike. ‘Which part?’ ‘All of me.’ Ben Power and Tim Carroll have had the inspired idea of sifting the highlights of Spike’s wartime diaries and turning them into a singalong comedy tribute biography. But hang on. What’s a singalong comedy tribute biography?

Jerusalem Royal Court Dreams of Violence Soho Lock him up. On paper, the central character of Jez Butterworth’s new play looks like a worthless nuisance, a menace to society. Rooster Byron lives in a derelict caravan and earns cash by supplying children with controlled drugs. He’s a scroundrel, a drunkard, a liar, a sponger, a womaniser, an absentee father, possibly a burglar too. He’s also a charmer, a spinner of yarns, a laugh. The action takes place on St George’s day and Rooster’s band of followers are preparing to resist the council’s efforts to evict him and throw him in jail. Meanwhile, a 15-year-old girl has gone missing and her distraught father (a former member of Rooster’s gang) is convinced Rooster knows her whereabouts.

Forbidden Broadway Menier Chocolate Factory Dr Korczak’s Example Arcola High hopes at the Chocolate Factory. The Southbank’s liveliest producing house has a great record for taking shows into the West End. Musicals are a speciality and the latest has just arrived from New York. Forbidden Broadway was created nearly three decades ago by rookie writer Gerard Alessandrini who hoped it might earn him some hackwork as a lyricist. The show ran for 27 years. In this version, spruced up and adapted for London, every aspect of theatre gets a splattering. Costly tickets, tacky souvenir shops, greedy impresarios, the glut of film revivals and the use of video projections instead of real sets.