Lloyd Evans is The Spectator's sketch-writer and theatre critic
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Why a book at all? This guide to email etiquette, written by a pair of New York Times hacks, ought to exist as a viral attachment bouncing around the world from computer to computer. It kicks off with Jo Moore’s notorious and oft-misquoted email. Here’s the exact wording: ‘It is now a very good day
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Strange business walking into the Three Sisters at the Barbican. A vast new temporary seating complex has been built over the auditorium, and as you wander along the reverberating walkways you can peer down through the gaps and make out the familiar opulent cushions of the stalls below you, all shadowy and deserted. It’s like
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Is the National Theatre a cemetery? Its administrators seem to think so. Last week they decided to cover the Lyttelton fly-tower with a sort of vertical putting green which gives the NT bunker a completely new look: no longer a stone-circle of squatting oblongs and failed turrets laminated with slow-drying cow-dung. It now resembles a
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It was pretty barmy ten years ago but now it’s downright insane. When I last dabbled in the London property market, prices were rocketing and there were half a dozen buyers for every property. These days it’s a whole lot worse but I’ve got no choice. My wife and I have a toddler nearing his
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Holocaust art must be approached with care. There’s a worry that by finding fault you’re somehow failing to take the world’s all-time Number one human rights violation seriously. Kindertransport follows the tale of Eva, a Jewish schoolgirl sent from Nazi Germany to Britain at the close of the 1930s. She’s adopted by a rough-diamond Manchester
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Piers Morgan is big in the US. After his dismissal from the Mirror in 2004 he spent a thankless year as a freelance hack in Britain before popping up as the token ‘nasty Brit’ on Simon Cowell’s blockbusting show America’s Got Talent. This book traces his journey from sacked hack to superstar but unlike The
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Questions are easy, answers less so. That’s the conclusion of Joe Penhall’s new morality play and it won’t come as a surprise to anyone brighter than a hedgehog. A brilliant but unstable missile scientist has invented a gizmo that will give Britain military superiority for a generation. Professor Brainiac then suffers an attack of conscience
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No question about it. If you had to name the 500 brightest periods in the history of human creativity, you wouldn’t include West Germany in the 1970s. What did they give us, those occidental Heinrichs and Helmuts? The Volkswagen Golf, the Baader-Meinhof gang, Boney M and a team of hyperefficient donkeys who fluked the World
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Too much artist and not enough art. That’s one problem with Total Eclipse, Christopher Hampton’s play about the titans of French 19th-century poetry. Another is presentation. The show is done ‘in the round’ on a raised slipway between two banks of seats irradiated by the glare reflected from the stage. This is bonkers. The reason
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As soon as she arrives everything falls apart. Dame Maggie Smith’s appearance in Edward Albee’s 1980 play The Lady From Dubuque marks the point when it all goes wrong. This isn’t her fault. She’s the most watchable and effective thing on stage and even now, on the fringes of old age, her lazy twangy sexy
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Rory Bremner is in a hurry. The controversial impersonator surges into his production office a few minutes late for our meeting. ‘So sorry. Did they tell you? We overran,’ he says in his light, energetic voice. ‘Won’t be a sec. Got to go to the loo. Ooh! Too much information.’ A few minutes later he
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‘I’m not a snob. Ask anyone. Well, anyone who matters.’ The author of this self-knowing gem is Simon LeBon and I read it on a freesheet discarded on the bus that took me to see Martin Crimp’s state-of-the-nation play, Attempts on her Life. Amazingly, this tossed-aside gag was the high point of my evening. Mr
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Happy birthday to The Entertainer. The ultimate state-of-the-nation play is 50 years old. I’ve never quite bought the idea that Archie Rice, a failed music-hall comedian, is supposed to represent Britain’s decline as a superpower. A clapped-out comic to symbolise the death of a military hegemony? Don’t get it. But at the time this revolutionary
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‘How I hate!’ is the first line of Torben Betts’s new play. Not a promising start. A teenage Goth with a scowl like a squashed spider crouches in her bedroom ranting against her smugger-than-smug parents. A revolution erupts. The Goth cheers and is then raped by a mad soldier. The civil war ends and order
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Crack crack crack. Three shots, really close, from a car-park just across the road. Everyone in the crowded street stopped. No doubt what this was — gun crime erupting under our noses. Two more shots. Crack crack. Then another. Crack! My eight-month-old son was in a buggy and I shoved him into a gap between
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Got the right place? Yup, this looks like it. I’m about to meet TV’s grumpiest man, and his fixers have booked us a room in a fashionable media institute in Covent Garden. I peer through the frosted glass at what appears to be a hotel, a bistro, a therapy centre and a health farm all
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Wicked is a musical based on the early life of the Wicked Witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz. So what’s wrong with it, apart from the subject obviously? Well, if you go to a musical you don’t expect to spend three hours denied the pleasure of a hummable tune, a decent gag,
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Here he is. One of Britain’s leading young directors. Tall, sturdily built, mid-thirties, with a mop of thick dark hair and a starter beer gut obtruding discreetly beneath the woolly slopes of his green jumper. Ed Hall, son of Sir Peter, is best known as the founder of Propeller, a company that specialises in all-male
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Until last week I was the only person on the planet not to have seen The History Boys. I now rejoin the human race in a state of wonder. Such a whopping hit, such flimsy materials. The setting happens to be familiar to me, a state school in the 1980s where a group of smart
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It’s always puzzled me that so few theatre critics are involved in making (rather than interpreting, dissecting and sometimes destroying) theatre. Hats off to Time Out reviewer Robert Shore, who’s quitted the breaker’s yard for the production line. Anxious about this new departure, he admits he ‘finds criticism almost impossible to bear’, although he ‘doesn’t