Lloyd Evans

Lloyd Evans

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

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

HMS Brown is sinking

A commanding performance from Cameron today. There were large cheers, and larger expectations, on the Tories benches as he stood up. His first words were an improvised response to the opening question, placed by Labour poodle Khalid Mahmood, demanding that ‘the allegations against Sir James Crosby must be investigated.’ ‘So,’ said Cameron, ‘they can even plant questions at short notice.’ He invited the Prime Minister to admit ‘a serious error of judgement’ in appointing James Crosby to the FSA. Brown waffled about awaiting the outcome of various investigations and Cameron came back forcefully calling Crosby ‘the man who was going to sort out mortgage market’.

Lloyd Evans

Indefinable charm

Enjoy Gielgud Entertaining Mr Sloane Trafalgar Studio A View from the Bridge Duke of York’s How does he get away with it? The main target of Alan Bennett’s 1980 comedy Enjoy is disability. Ageing Connie has pre-senile dementia and her husband Wilf is partially paralysed and prone to blackouts. Their condemned terraced house is about to be flattened by their progressive council who’ve sent in a sociologist to record the slum-dwellers’ behaviour for posterity. Shaken from their habitual indolence, Connie and Wilf blunder about the house bickering ignorantly while the mute observer takes notes.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

‘Basically, I’m a spineless wimp’

Steven Berkoff admits to Lloyd Evans that, despite his reputation, he’s not tough at all On the waterfront. This, literally, is where I meet Steven Berkoff to discuss his stage adaptation of the classic Fifties movie. Berkoff’s east London office is a sumptuous, spotlessly clean apartment with wraparound views of the grey-green Thames. He strolls in, direct from rehearsals, wearing dark loose baggy clothes. I’d expected a brash, superconfident whirlwind but Berkoff is softly spoken, pensive, hesitantly friendly. He even asks if I mind him smoking a roll-up. ‘Of course not.’ But he doesn’t have one. Instead we sip coffee at a vast polished black table.

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Brown gets through PMQs smiling

After a nifty performance last week, Dave displayed lots of sluggish footwork today. Everyone was desperate for him to nail Brown over his ‘British jobs for British workers’ gaffe but instead Dave opened by asking the PM to condemn international protectionism. An easy shot, safely dealt with by Brown. What was Dave playing at? The TV news is teeming with ‘winter of discontent’ style images showing crowds of indignant workers braving the blizzards to demonstrate their anger against the PM. And the Tory leader doesn’t mention it? Eventually, on his third question, Dave finally stirred himself to ask Brown to admit that BJ4BW had been a mistake and to apologise. Brown wriggled and squirmed.

Lloyd Evans

Caledonian whimsy

Be Near Me Donmar Complicit Old Vic Here’s the odd thing about the Donmar, the country’s pre-eminent theatrical power-house. Its productions are nearly always stunning and rarely (very rarely) atrocious. They don’t do so-so. But here we have it, an OK sort of show done with tremendous affection and commitment but with numerous elementary flaws. Be Near Me, adapted by Ian McDiarmid from the novel by Andrew O’Hagan, passes the first test of art. It has integrity and sincerity. Everyone involved in the production clearly gave it their best shot. So what’s wrong? Well, the storyline advances with all the pace and vigour of a snail having a heart attack.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Smoky notes of the islands: a Burns Night dinner

A wintry London night and the haunting note of the bagpipes summoned us to Burns supper at Boisdale of Belgravia. In the doorway Pipe Major Willie Cochrane paused for breath and shook my hand. ‘Are they giving you a nip of something later?’ I asked. ‘I’ve got one right there,’ he said, pointing to a glass of Johnny Walker tucked beneath the Boisdale pavement sign. ‘It’s good stuff. But don’t tell anyone.’ ‘Hey,’ I said, ‘my lips are sealed.’ Taxis arrived and a succession of notorious characters appeared. Lorraine Kelly, Kirsty Wark, Dougray Scott, Duncan Bannatyne and others, all nominees for Boisdale’s inaugural ‘Great Scot’ award.

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

A buoyant Cameron gives Brown a PMQs kicking

Today’s PMQs was both tedious and fascinating. Dave marched in with a two-pronged strategy. To force the PM to call the recession ‘a bust’ and accept personal responsibility for it. He knew Gordon would refuse to make either admission so he had a statistical counter-attack up his sleeve. He quoted the definition of an economic bust given by Gordon to a select committee last year. ‘A reduction in GDP of one and a half percent.’ So would the PM concede that our economy was due to shrink by that amount, or more, this year? Would he hell. Brown loves spewing out statistics but hates it when they’re flung back at him and he deployed his pre-arranged rhetorical defence.

Lloyd Evans

Shorter, please

A Midsummer Night’s Dream Novello Thriller — Live Lyric Too long. Too long. Way, way too long. Is it just me or is A Midsummer Night’s Dream twice the length it should be? No, it’s not just me. It’s everyone. It has to be. And I blame the movies. Billy Wilder reckoned a comedy should last no more than an hour and a half. ‘Every minute over 90,’ he said, ‘counts against you.’ Obviously, films aren’t plays but we’ve been schooled unwittingly in the celluloid aesthetic and we can’t park it in the cloakroom, we bring it to the auditorium.

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Oom pah pah!

Oliver! Drury Lane Roaring Trade Soho A show with an exclamation mark in the title has a lot of promises to fulfill. Oliver! opens on a magnificent note. The dark, silkily lit workhouse teems with the figures of stooped orphans who crawl up through the floorboards and march around the shadows like sad doomed little robots. And Julius D’Silva’s Mr Bumble has exactly the right mixture of gravity and silliness. Then things dip sharply. The funeral parlour scenes are marred by gosh-I’m-funny acting and the flimsy set is a sawn-off afterthought. Oliver’s big solo number ‘Where Is Love?’ comes out querulous and underpowered, possibly because somebody asked Harry Stott to do it lying on his side, propped on one arm.

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Crude but shrewd

Gordon spent Christmas learning the catechism from Peter Mandelson. Today we heard the result. And it sounded robotic. ‘Do nothing’ is his clockwork description of the Tories. ‘Real help’ is the mantra for Labour. The first question at PMQs came from a government stooge asking about loan guarantees. Gordon stood up and re-announced his scheme to underwrite £10 billion worth of business debts. ‘Real help’ he said. Again and again. I lost count after the fifth repetition. Cameron responded by departing from his script. ‘Planted question, copied policy.’ This was his best moment.

Lloyd Evans

Tourist attraction

Well Apollo Hit Me! The Life and Rhymes of Ian Dury Leicester Square In Blood: The Bacchae Arcola So what does the theatre critic make of the recession? No one’s asked me, actually, so here goes. Leaving aside the obsessive 24-hour media coverage, there’s little trace of it in the real world. Immunise your bonce against the gloom-rites of the newspapers and you’ll see that the impending ‘slump’ (dimple, actually) will prove to be the briefest and shallowest downturn in economic history. By next Christmas the factories will be pumping out skiploads of new consumer junk, the FTSE will be performing dizzying feats of alpinism at the 6,000 mark and the present media-orchestrated collective trance will have become a distant memory. How do I know?

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Shakespeare it ain’t

The Cordelia Dream Wilton’s Music Hall Sunset Boulevard Comedy Marina Carr is a writer of enormous distinction which isn’t quite the same as being a writer of enormous talent. She’s been given chairs by so many universities that she could probably open a furniture shop. However, a certain snippet of advice — don’t invite comparisons with Shakespeare — seems to have escaped both her, and the RSC, who have commissioned a play from her which explicitly sets out to re-configure the Lear–Cordelia relationship. A different writer might have disguised her artistic ambitions with more guile but, no, here comes Professor Carr to conquer Everest in her flip-flops and T-shirt.

Monday

Lloyd Evans

Enchanted evening

Twelfth Night Wyndhams Loot Tricycle Another stunna from Michael Grandage. His production of Twelfth Night is an excellent and often beautiful frivolity and if you’re a fan of the play it’s a must-see event. I can’t stand the thing, I’m afraid, and even this fine production doesn’t mask the script’s shortcomings. The ploy involving Olivia’s counterfeit passion for Malvolio is far too heavily signalled to work. The yellow stockings, the ‘cross-gartered’ business, the smiling. Has that ever really tickled the stalls? I doubt it. The fuse of surprise, vital to any comic detonation, is missing.

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

A lifeless affair

Was that PMQs? It felt more like the monthly meeting of a particularly soporific knitting circle. The last fixture before Christmas is usually full of mayhem and mischief but Gordon Brown is abroad this week taking his smirk on a tour of the east, so the understudies replaced the regular opponents. In the past Harriet Harman vs William Hague has been an electrifying bout but a sparsely populated house seemed to anticipate disappointment.  Hattie has got the feel for it by now. And Hague? He seems to have lost the feel for it. Or perhaps he deliberately underperformed so as not to overshadow his leader. His tactics were stunningly predictable. His half-hearted call for an inquiry into the Iraq war was easily dealt with. Sure, but not till the troops come home.

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Gleeful terror

Mother Goose Hackney Empire Hamlet Novello God, I hate the panto season. Especially the reviews. You get some cynical, steely-hearted, acid-flinging critic who takes his two-year-old kid to a Christmas show for the first time and the old bruiser’s heart melts, his brain mushes up and his review reads like the last paragraph of a Mills & Boon novel, all gooey and dribbling with marshmallowy tosh. It’s bloody awful. Mind you, if you’d seen little Isaac at Mother Goose perched on my knee with his friend Leo beside him in his yellow parka with the hood up, your heart would have melted too. What a huggable wuggable pair of idgeable squidgeable little shiny pink-cheeked angels they were.

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

The Doormat PM toils through PMQs

It was a tale of two howlers at today’s PMQs. The Prime Minister made the fatal mistake of pausing at the wrong moment. David Cameron had probed him about the recapitalised banks’ failure to lend to small businesses and Brown stood up, swelling confidently into one of his self-congratulatory orations. ‘Not only did we save the world banking system,’ he meant to say but a half-second pause after ‘world’ meant that ‘banking system’ never came out. ‘Not only did we save the world …’ The Tories howled and jeered for a full minute while the Speaker, playing the diligent killjoy, flapped his hands to calm them down.

Lloyd Evans

Diffident misfits

In a Dark Dark House Almeida I Found My Horn Tristan Bates Maria Friedman: Re-Arranged Trafalgar Studios What, already? Another Neil LaBute play? Here we go again then. This time his close-knit group of eloquent and stylishly tormented yuppies (he doesn’t do other types) are haunted by the aftermath of a child abuse episode. As kid brothers, Terry and Drew were interfered with by a friend of the family and now, years later, Drew has been charged with drunkenly crashing his car. He persuades Terry to appear in court as a character witness and to mention the abuse in order to soften up the judges before sentencing. The ruse works, Terry testifies, Drew gets off. This is a bizarre idea. Victims of child rape are partially exempt from the drink-drive laws?

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

‘They treat me more like a devil than a god’

Lloyd Evans finds that Bernard-Henri Lévy is not the ageing French dandy of caricature but a serious intellectual with views on everything from Barack Obama to the Muslim veil Oh goody. He’s late. Every journalist wants the interviewee to miss the appointment, if possible by several hours. It gives us the advantage and obliges our subject to apologise or face being lacerated in print for the transgression. French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy arrives 35 minutes after the agreed time and greets me with a disarming combination of lightly salted regret and a plausible excuse. In France, Lévy is so famous that he’s known by the simple acronym BHL, like a furniture superstore or a killer virus.

Lloyd Evans

Relative values

The Family Reunion Donmar Chicken Hackney Empire August: Osage County Lyttelton T.S. Eliot was in his fifties when he turned to the theatre. What’s amazing about his 1939 play, The Family Reunion, is its experimental verve and nonchalant risk-loving energies. Harry, a country squire, returns from eight years abroad to take possession of his estate. His wife has died in a mysterious cruising accident and Harry astounds his family by announcing that he shoved her overboard. Did he? Or is he in the grip of morbid fantasies? Eliot wants to marry several genres here, Gothic horror, country-house whodunnit, Greek tragedy and absurdist sketch-comedy and not all the play’s combinations are successful, but Jeremy Herrin’s production is undoubtedly stylish.

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

The fall guy

Break out the bunting. Crack open the champagne. Spit-roast the capon and prepare to party. Or, come to think of it, don’t bother. Break out the bunting. Crack open the champagne. Spit-roast the capon and prepare to party. Or, come to think of it, don’t bother. The fourth centenary of John Milton, which falls on 9 December, is unlikely to be greeted by an outburst of joyful carousing. Of all the great English writers (and he ranks among the half dozen greatest poets in all literature) Milton is the least cherished, the most lacking in glamour, the hardest to adore. His peculiar misfortune is to have been always out of fashion.