Lloyd Evans

Ivanov Wyndham’s Theatre Now or Later Royal Court Rain Man Apollo Great directors have the power to alter taste. Michael Grandage’s avowed aim with this revival of Ivanov, which opens the Donmar’s year-long residency at the Wyndham’s, is to secure the play a permanent place in the repertory. But even a director as sure-footed as Grandage can’t overcome the script’s shortcomings. Dashed off in ten days by a 27-year-old Chekhov, it feels glib and careless, its imitative homages to Hamlet creaky and self-conscious. Ivanov is a country landowner, his debts climbing, his marriage sinking, infatuated with a neighbour’s young daughter and with a peculiar taste for philosophical ramblings.

Joan Rivers: A Work in Progress by a Life in Progress Leicester Square Theatre Liberty Globe Sons of York Finborough Let’s hear it for those ageing babes and their one-gran shows. Hip, hip, hip-replacement. Britt Ekland and Elaine Stritch are already at it, and here comes Joan Rivers who wastes no time wasting the opposition. ‘Anyone see Elaine Stritch? Wonderful show wasn’t it? Mind you, it was all me, me, me, me, me, me. “I understudied Ethel Merman. And I drank. I worked with Noel Coward. And I drank. I tried to seduce Rock Hudson. And he drank.”’ At 75, Rivers is easy on the eye, like a well-set egg custard in a wig.

Gone Too Far! Hackney Empire Eating Ice Cream on Gaza Beach Soho Piaf Donmar Anyone for a knife crime comedy? Bola Agbaje’s attempt to get laughs from our anxieties about blade-wielding teenagers might have been a disaster if the script hadn’t been so witty and its examination of the subdivisions within black culture so penetrating. The play starts out, rather improbably, with a Nigerian boy Ikudayesi arriving to spend time with his brother Yemi who has been brought up in Britain. Yemi has always posed as a fashionable Caribbean and suppressed his west African lineage from a misplaced sense of shame. As a mixed-race kid puts it, ‘The Africans sold us to the white man and stayed behind living like kings and queens in their palaces.

Deep Cut Traverse Jidariyya Royal Lyceum 4.48 Psychosis King’s Theatre Eco-Friendly Jihad Underbelly Please Don’t Feed The Models Underbelly Scaramouche Jones Assembly Rooms Absolution Assembly Rooms Snap! That’s the sound of the credit crunch biting into attendance figures at Edinburgh. This year the Royal Mile teems with unloved luvvies urging discounted tickets on sceptical punters, and the city’s population of cadgers and tramps has fled. Usually they hover like spy planes and swoop on you demanding ‘a poond’. I was approached just once by a hapless ruin humbly tilting for 15 pence. This slump’s getting serious. Even the beggars are going out of business. There are winners, of course.

Dybbuk King’s Theatre Britt on Britt Assembly Rooms Surviving Spike Assembly Rooms Perhaps it should be the Inter-notional Festival. The posh bit of Edinburgh, the International Festival, is incurably besotted with the idea of conceptual hybrids, of cross-fertilisation between cultures. Their first offering is Dybbuk, a show about Jews, ghosts and exorcism, set in Poland and performed in Polish with an idiot-board over the stage showing a translation for English-speakers. The story is a little hard to grasp. A bride has been possessed by the spirit of her dead lover on the eve of her wedding. Meanwhile, an emigrant somewhere in America is being haunted by a Holocaust victim who is also his half-brother. Establishing these complexities takes an hour.

Lloyd Evans on the esotericism of the Festival and the ragamuffin risk-taking of the Fringe Here we go again. Like some vast, hairy, attention-seeking arachnid, the Edinburgh Festival has settled its gross and gorgeous shape in the shadow of Arthur’s Seat. Ever since its inception in 1947 the Festival has grown steadily and spawned a rowdy litter of symbiotic events. Comedy, literature, classical music, film, ballet, modern dance, jazz and blues and even ‘spirituality and peace’. All are represented. But the Festival’s heart, its alpha and omega, is the theatre. Whenever I flip through the International Festival brochure I’m staggered and slightly alarmed by its strenuously esoteric contents. Daring. That’s the word.

Her Naked Skin Olivier Elaine Stritch At Liberty Shaw In 2004 Rebecca Lenkiewicz got the black spot from the Critics’ Circle. Sorry, I mean she was voted ‘most promising playwright’. Less a gong, more a millstone. Praising writers for what they’ve done is fine. Praising them for what they may do in future is like congratulating a pregnant woman on her foetus’s A-levels results. Lenkiewicz’s latest work about the suffragette movement arrives with fresh honours. The programme grandly announces that Her Naked Skin is ‘the first play by a living woman writer on the Olivier stage’. How aristocratic. It demands respect on account of its status at birth.

Zorro Garrick The Tailor and Ansty Old Red Lion Is Zorro any good? Forget the show for a second, look at the marketing. The stars are English, the story is American and the music, by the Gypsy Kings, is French with a strong Spanish flavour. That’s half the Western hemisphere covered. Nice work, everyone. Things start uneasily with a crowd of Romany dancers on stage performing a heel-bashing number that doesn’t do much more than rattle your fillings. Next the show hurtles from California to Barcelona and back, establishing the complex background of the central figure, Diego, a renegade cavalry officer who must wrest the Spanish colony of Los Angeles from the grip of an evil usurper, who was once his childhood pal.

On the Rocks Hampstead In My Name Trafalgar Studios All Nudity Shall Be Punished Union Uh oh. Writers writing about writers writing. Amy Rosenthal’s new play is set in 1916 in a Cornish village. D.H. Lawrence, suffering from writer’s block, has suggested to the publisher John Middleton Murry and his lover Katherine Mansfield, who is also blocked, that they rent adjoining cottages. This promises to be a meagre, literary love-in but the play succeeds extremely well, even for a sceptic like me who remains unconvinced by Lawrence’s obese sentiment-laden novels. (My preference is for the eerie, formless and completely masterful late poems like ‘The Mosquito’ and ‘Baby Tortoise’).

2,000 Feet Away Bush Relocated Royal Court The Chalk Garden Donmar America is nuts about paedophiles. That’s the take-home message of Anthony Weigh’s new play 2,000 Feet Away, which stars Joseph Fiennes. The title refers to a provision of Megan’s law which sets out the minimum permissible distance between the home of a paedophile and any place where children are likely to gather. The law has unintended consequences. A town can completely rid itself of sex offenders if enough inhabitants register their houses as children’s nurseries. The sex offenders are evicted and, deprived of any loyalty to a world they can never rejoin, they congregate in shoddy hotels where they help each other develop ruses to approach children while evading detection.