Lloyd Evans

Absurd Person Singular, Garrick Women of Troy, Lyttelton Cinderella, Old Vic   Five years as a critic and I’ve never seen anything by Alan Ayckbourn. With a flicker of apprehension in my heart I took my seat at the Garrick. Absurd Person Singular (nice title, nothing to do with the play) begins at a bourgeois drinks party. Calamity unfolds. Wife forgets to buy tonic, dons mackintosh, exits into rain via back door, returns from off-licence, finds back door locked so must re-enter house via front door without being spotted by guests because rained-on mac looks silly. See her problem? Nor did I, but the comedy of the first act rests entirely on one’s ability to sympathise with this trifling dilemma.

On Tuesday Chiwetel Ejiofor and Ewan McGregor take on Othello at the Donmar. If the show hasn’t sold out already, it soon will. Doubtless the starry cast will help shift a lot of tickets but so will the play’s peculiar ‘self-rationing’ effect. Of Shakespeare’s four great tragedies, Othello is the least often revived. The play has always been particularly problematic, not because it’s bad — though in parts it is — but because it’s so outstandingly good. The final act is perhaps the finest piece of pure theatre ever written, a sublime blend of nail-biting suspense, heartbreaking pathos and triple-fortissimo lyrical effects.

The Arsonists, Royal Court; The Giant, Hampstead; The Bicycle, MenKing’s Head   Strange happenings in theatreland. Three London playhouses have taken it into their heads to mount a sustained attack on the avant garde. Result â” carnage! Careers are in tatters. Reputations have been shredded. Some of these playwrights will never be seen again. In August the Donmar cruelly demonstrated that N.F. Simpson was unworthy of adult attention by staging two of his silliest playlets alongside a slice of tedious cleverness by Michael Frayn. Last month the Royal Court embarrassed Ionesco by putting on his dated sci-fi fantasy, Rhinoceros. Next the Almeida started knocking lumps out of Caryl Churchill with a resuscitation of her 1970s dodo, Cloud Nine.

Theatre: Lotte’s Journey, Cloud Nine, Joe Guy Beware of plays that open on trains trundling through Europe in the 1940s. You know where they’re heading. The strength of Candida Cave’s new work, Lotte’s Journey, is that it evades cliché by telling the passengers’ stories in reverse. In particular we focus on Charlotte Saloman, a brilliant Jewish artist haunted by the suicide of her mother and grandmother. The script is technically ambitious and takes us from Berlin to Rome and Nice, and covers Saloman’s life from the age of eight when her father explained the cause of her mother’s death as influenza. These large transitions are skilfully handled by Ninon Jerome’s direction.

Big date for Bohemians next month: 28 November marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of William Blake whose memory is honoured by every moth-eaten visionary, every babbling poet and every garret-bound artist flinging paint at a canvas. Nowadays, Blake’s eminence is universally accepted but the great mystery of his career is that his achievements, as both illustrator and poet, made such a feeble impression on his contemporaries. It didn’t help that he was widely thought mad. And he complained throughout his life of a ‘Nervous Fear’ that made him uneasy in company. Because of his visions his behaviour was often weird.