Lloyd Evans

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.

Gone With the Wind  New London Theatre How did they get it so wrong? Turning chicklit’s greatest story into a hit musical should have been a doddle. Just put the characters on stage and let the warm romantic breeze of the narrative carry you safely home. And that’s exactly what Trevor Nunn has done and yet the critics have misinterpreted Gone with the Wind and denounced it as a flop. I’m baffled. At last week’s Saturday matinée I joined a sell-out crowd and saw a handsome gutsy version of a completely captivating novel. Never mind the timeless magic of the storyline, look at the performances.

Small Change Donmar War and Peace, I and II Hampstead Oh my God. Did that really happen? I knew nothing about Peter Gill’s 1976 play, Small Change, before arriving at the Donmar to see this revival under the author’s own direction. It’s a love letter, an immensely detailed and spectacularly superficial account of the working-class experience as related by four dimwits living and whingeing in south Wales. It may be a script but it isn’t a drama. Screeds of Dylanesque poetic observation are interrupted by shouting matches. There’s no story, nothing at stake for the characters, no suspense at all, just a pair of brainless rowdies and their battleaxe mums splurging out wordy tosh about their hopes and feelings and their thwarted this, that and the other.

Wedding Day at the Cro-Magnons Soho The Internationalist Gate The Black and White Ball King’s Head You can tell when a culture has lost its way because it starts handing out awards. There’s a small club of annual prizes that have some legitimacy. Oscar, Bafta, Booker, Olivier, Nobel — all provide worthwhile verdicts on the disciplines they attach themselves to. But adding to their number cheapens the entire enterprise. Like prophets and fire drills, the more awards there are the more they get ignored. Little surprise, then, that the Lebanese playwright Wajdi Mouawad has collected so many trophies that he has to scramble over heaped ramparts of silverware every time he leaves the house.

God of Carnage Gielgud Never So Good Lyttelton Into the Hoods Novello Nothing terribly original about Yasmina Reza’s new play, God of Carnage, which examines the idea that civilised behaviour is a decorative curtain that masks our true savagery. Two nice smug bourgeois couples, while attempting to patch up a row between their sons, descend into an inferno of violence and rage. But the show, not least on account of the script, is an absolute triumph. The back story is contrived with great artistry so that small plot details reappear with minor changes that give them massive new force. And Reza draws her characters very deftly and sympathetically. But her orchestration of relationships is, if I’m being fussy and I usually am, a bit limited.

A Couple of Poor, Polish-Speaking Romanians Soho Theatre The Man Who Had All the Luck Donmar Warehouse Brave thrusts at the Soho. A wacky new play by Polish wunderkind Dorota Maslowska has been translated and directed by the theatre’s artistic supremo, Lisa Goldman. It opens with a pair of ugly drunken hitch-hikers speaking English in dense Slavic accents. They get a lift from a mild-mannered twit who speaks English in an English accent and after threatening him with murder they set off on a bizarre journey across Poland towards Warsaw. To be properly understood the play requires an exact knowledge of Eastern Europe’s recent history.