Lloyd Evans

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.

Lloyd Evans on the perils of being both playwright and critic ‘No man sympathises with the sorrows of vanity.’ Dr Johnson was speaking of a poet who looked to his friends for solace after his verses had been savaged in the press. He got none. That’s the risk all artists take. I’ve been through this experience myself (and I’m about to submit to the ordeal once again), and though I found it hurtful and humiliating to have my work trashed in public, it also enriched my understanding of the theatre and assisted me as a professional critic. In 2005 Toby Young and I collaborated on a sex farce, Who’s the Daddy?, which enjoyed a sell-out run on the London fringe and won a best new comedy award in a trade paper.

Afterlife Lyttelton Dickens Unplugged Comedy Afterlife is pH-neutral. It doesn’t enhance Michael Frayn’s reputation and doesn’t damage it either. Max Reinhardt was one of the great theatrical magicians of the 20th century and it’s easy to see what drew Frayn and his long-standing collaborator, the director Michael Blakemore, to the challenge of putting his life on stage. The result is a grand, beautiful, finely acted and richly imaginative show. One snag. Frayn shouldn’t have written it. Reinhardt is now almost forgotten so first up you need some plain-speaking nuts-and-bolts data entry. Who is he, where’s he from, what did he do?

Rosmersholm Almeida Love — The Musical Lyric Fat Pig Trafalgar Studio A Norwegian melodrama about suicide, socialism and thwarted sexual passion. If you saw that on the poster would you be tempted? Nor me. Add the authorship of Ibsen and you might change your mind but you’d be unwise. Rosmersholm is a clumsy, unengaging late play with ghastly characters and weird, wonky relationships. Rosmer, a former priest, shares his house with a blonde sex bomb Rebecca, who was the best friend of his mad wife who drowned herself in a pond. Instead of enjoying a summer of love, the priest and the blonde live a life of irritating and blameless chastity. Enter a bigoted prig with a fairytale baddie name, Dr Kroll, who invites Rosmer to join his right-wing alliance.

This ought to be a hit. The Les Mis team are back in the West End with another French classic. The Lady of the Camellias, by Alexandre Dumas fils, is the play that inspired Verdi’s La Traviata and the Garbo film Camille. Retitled Marguerite the story has been parked in wartime Paris where the leading lady is servicing a Wehrmacht general. A sticky corner of history to choose. Occupied Paris forces us to make uncomfortable moral decisions about the characters. Who do we side with? Marguerite, perhaps. But she’s a collaborator. Her friends? They’re all parasites and profiteers who call the RAF ‘barbarians’ and want the British to lose the war. The soon-to-be-jilted lover, Otto?

The Deep Blue Sea Vaudeville The Birthday Party Lyric Hammersmith Pygmalion Old Vic Osborne crushed Rattigan. Crudely stated, that’s what we’re told happened in 1956 when Osborne’s demotic new voice displaced Rattigan’s classier, cosier manner. Even now Rattigan’s reputation hasn’t fully recovered and The Deep Blue Sea, which premièred in 1952, is the first of his plays I’ve seen in the West End. And guess what? It feels exactly like Look Back in Anger. The setting is identical — a shabby flat. The storyline uses the same torrid love triangle. Two similar outlooks are examined: reckless youth is contrasted with safe, dull conservatism. And both plays have a familiarly rancid atmosphere.

Tinderbox Bush The Year of Magical Thinking Lyttelton If you aren’t sure what to make of the present, try shoving it into the future. This trusted device is employed by Lucy Kirkwood (who writes for Channel 4’s admired show Skins), in her first stage play, Tinderbox. We’re in a nightmarish England, seared by Saharan heat, shrunk by global warming and torn apart by gang warfare. Cockney Saul has moved from drowned London to hilly Bradford where he runs a meat delivery business with his sweet cowed wife Vanessa and their new Scots apprentice Perchik. Gosh, it’s hard to follow this muddled, mapless future. We don’t even know what year we’re in. Instead the script uses valuable time telling us what to think of Saul.