Lloyd Evans

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?

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.

Gethsemane Cottesloe State of Emergency Gate There’s a massive hole in the middle of David Hare’s new play. It’s called Iraq. What an issue that was. What a best-seller. Talk about box-office. For two or three years it seemed that Hare had single-handedly won the Iraq war but his victory proved tenuous and short-lived. Once the killing tailed off and the issue slithered down the news agenda, he was left without his worldwide smash-hit subject. A terrible loss. In Stuff Happens and The Vertical Hour, the Iraq issue set Hare’s mind ablaze and he produced thrilling bursts of political analysis and polemic.

Yard Gal Oval House Lucky Seven Hampstead Last week I saw a little-known play, Yard Gal, which I’m pretty sure is a classic. Written ten years ago by Rebecca Prichard and revived with scintillating and furious energy by Stef O’Driscoll, the play follows the lives of two drug–whore teenagers, Boo and Marie, living in the badlands of Hackney. The girls exist in a boozed-up whirl of crappy nightclubs, tainted coke and rough sex with strangers. An early scene gives the flavour. Marie fellates a bent copper in a squad car and when he fails to pay up she exacts revenge with her teeth. ‘Smallest meal I ever ate.’ The plot is slender. Boo falls out with a rival gang member, there’s a bust-up, a stabbing and a prison conviction. All fairly predictable.

To Be Straight With You Lyttelton American Briefs Above the Stag, 15 Bressenden Place, SW1 It’s been said that the Catholic Church has always known how to deal with extremists. It also knows — or used to know — how to deal with homosexuals. Monasteries populated by ‘celibate’ bachelors, nunneries teeming with wimpled lesbians, these were the discreetly sanctioned gay playgrounds which gave the Church licence to exploit a talent pool it would have lost had it rigorously pursued the technical prohibition against homosexuality. In fact, the Old Testament God isn’t a particularly virulent homophobe. Cattle-rustlers and liars are mentioned in the Ten Commandments. Gays aren’t.

Oedipus Olivier La Clique Hippodrome Here it is. The National’s autumn blockbuster, Oedipus. Of all the plays of classical antiquity this is the best, the most accessible, the least tedious, and Jonathan Kent’s impressive production allows the beautiful and awful symmetry of the storyline to work its magic. Yet Kent and his designer Paul Brown aren’t quite immune to the tempting follies of conceptualism. The set has big ideas. It’s a convex platform,  a sort of upside-down wok, with a steep gradient which makes the actors stand at a tilt, like Charlie Brown and chums on their pitcher’s mound. And it revolves with painful and inexorable slowness, completing a full cycle during the course of the play. One can imagine the peals of ‘genius!