Lloyd Evans

If you can, get to Macbeth. Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood have set a benchmark that will remain for years. Never mind impersonating the murderous couple, these two look like the genuine article. Consider Stewart. That sly and lordly head, those inscrutable little eyes, the smirking menace, the sudden changes of temper. A king, easily, or a killer of kings. And Kate Fleetwood is the most terrifying Lady Macbeth I’ve ever seen. Imagine Lauren Bacall with the eyes of a cobra. There’s a coldness and cruelty about her so palpable that it seems an aspect of her nature, not of her art. And the sexual chemistry between them, the slow hungry greed of their embraces, suggests a violent eroticism.

TV or not TV, that is the question pondered by Edinburgh every year. An unseen faultline divides the audiences from the performers. Audiences want to get away from TV while performers — especially comedians — want to embrace it. Les Dennis, who has done telly already, transcends the rift in his new hybrid show which combines drama, mime and cabaret in a way that would never work on the box. Certified Male (St George’s West) is the sentimental story of four businessmen on a bonding holiday in the tropics. Laddish humour abounds. ‘Cover that up,’ says Dennis’s mate as he bares his plump belly, ‘before Friends of the Earth push it back out to sea.’ This schmaltzy examination of male angst was drawing pretty large audiences.

Tony Blair — the Musical / Gilded Balloon; Tony! The Blair Musical / Chambers St; Yellow Hands / St George’s West; Jihad: the Musical / Chambers St; The Bacchae / King’s Theatre Here’s the formula for satire at the Fringe. Take a scary concept, stick ‘the musical’ after it and you’ve got a catchy title and an audience. Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Saddam, Osama — all been done before. This year it’s Blair. Twice over, in fact. Like we haven’t had enough of him? Tony Blair — the Musical is so toothless it belongs in an old people’s home. The cast are genial but the presentation is slapdash.

When the public ignores a playwright, it’s not because the public is wrong but because the playwright deserves to be ignored. Director Paul Miller and translator Clare Bayley have ‘rediscovered’ an obscure Swedish novelist, Victoria Benedictsson, who wrote one play (and it shows) and then stabbed herself in the throat. Set in Paris, The Enchantment is a feeble and self- conscious replica of Hedda Gabler. The characters are supremely unattractive. Niamh Cusack’s Erna is a spiky shrew, Nancy Carroll’s Louise is a squashed rose petal, Hugh Skinner’s Viggo is a beaming jerk and Zubin Varla’s Gustave is a narcissistic stud bristling with clichés from the rotter’s handbook. Varla has been beamed into the wrong play.

A strange night at the Soho. Before curtain-up the place was crowded with people excitedly conversing with each other yet there was practically no noise. They were deaf. Signed conversation requires full and constant eye contact, which makes it more intense, intimate and animated than our conversation, and as I watched the deaf exchanging their artful, fascinating hand-dances I felt an enormous pang of envy. What a club to belong to! And this turned out to be the theme of the play. John and Alison, both deaf, have a daughter who needs a mechanical implant to improve her hearing. Alison is keen but John fears that the doctors are plotting to ruin his family.

Adorable, sensational Joseph. I was bowled over by this show, not just by the slick vitality of the 60-strong cast, not just by the teasingly satirical hippy-trippy lighting effects, not just by Preeya Kalidas’s gloriously stylish Narrator, and not just by the Mel Brooksian chorus-line of high-kicking Jewish shepherds, no — by the material. Talk about genius from nowhere. The script originated as a 20-minute end-of-term sketch for the pupils of St Paul’s in west London. Its charm and its technical brilliance were noticed immediately and the show, once expanded, launched its authors heavenwards. Tim Rice’s lyrics are joyously witty.

Glass Eels / Love’s Labour’s Lost / Saint Joan Squelchy trotters up in Hampstead. Nell Leyshon’s new play is set on a Somerset flood plain where a family of bumpkin farmers are coping with a suicide. Before the action commences Mum has done a Virginia Woolf in the nearby river and her premature submersion furnishes the play with its central motif. During the action, the stage gradually fills with water. OK, fills. What happens is that a super-slow trickle very nearly covers the actors’ ankles. It doesn’t help that this liquid is the pure and pristine variety piped in by Thames Water (see website for details) while the script refers constantly to festering, murky, algae-ridden bilge in which the eels of the title wriggle and gleam.