Lloyd Evans is The Spectator's sketch-writer and theatre critic
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 reappears and sits patiently while I fiddle with the wrong buttons on the tape machine. ‘Quick soundcheck?’ ‘Testing, testing,’ he says helpfully. And we begin.
‘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 Crimp, a busy playwright with the resources of the National Theatre at his disposal, failed to produce anything as perceptive or entertaining as LeBon’s throwaway quip. Crimp’s play is a restless self-important plague of words and video-images, scruffy, impressionistic, ill-shaped and rambling, rather like this sentence, going everywhere and nowhere in particular.
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 play fomented a new kind of ambition for the theatre. A play was no longer just a play, it was a spiritual testament that reached beyond the foyer and into the streets, into the minds of the theatre-shunning majority, and captured the mood of the country.
‘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 is restored, and in the closing tableau the stupefyingly complacent parents spout bourgeois platitudes while their pregnant daughter is assaulted afresh, with their connivance, by her rapist. Clearly this is a Big Idea production which seeks to mount a blistering attack on Western values. That’s why it feels so dated. And yet there are good things here.
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 two parked cars. What next? Run for it? But I might charge into the line of fire. I paused, terrified. Around me everyone stared in shock and bewilderment. At the end of the street a young black guy came running round the corner, both hands under his sweatshirt, hiding something. He looked wired and frantic and was clearly fleeing danger but he was also trying to be unobtrusive. He ran a bit, then stopped, ran a bit more and stopped, looking over his shoulder anxiously. I froze.
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 wrapped into one. It’s the kind of place where brunching executives can enjoy an organic chocolate bun and a milky stroppuccino while upstairs, in the anxiety suites, commissioning editors are being massaged, hypnotised and rebirthed from the comfort of their rowing machines. I glance down the street. A dark figure is ambling towards me. His collar is turned up, his head is low over his chest and his face is obscured by a cap and thick glasses. Is that him? I think it is.
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, an engaging storyline or any attempt at an ensemble dance routine. The bald, belt-’em-out singing style doesn’t help, nor does the gaudy declarative acting. On the plus side, the scenery is spectacular, and there’s a massive articulated dragon’s head over the stage which flexes its iron neck and creaks its metal jaws while racking out groans of pain. It’s very impressive until you spot a puffing stage-hand in the wings yanking on a rope-and-pulley system.
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 productions of Shakespeare. He takes a seat opposite me and his shiny popping-out eyes give his round face the genial eagerness of a well-fed spaniel. We tuck into our lunch and he answers my questions with rambling, effusive paragraphs of luvvie-speak which are engaging, easy on the ear and at times faintly earnest.
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 alecs are preparing to take Oxbridge. All Alan Bennett’s failings and strengths are on view here. The perfunctory storyline is made up of a few broad gestures culminating in a not-terribly-surprising surprise ending. The cast consists of straight characters who are stereotypes and gay characters who are stereotypes with knobs on. The rest is rhetoric, atmosphere and the occasional excellent joke. ‘Archaeology is popular because it’s the nearest history gets to shopping.
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 mindpointing out problems with other people’s work’. Yeah, I know the feeling. In his new play, The Critic, a sneering old-school reviewer (bow tie, goatee, crimson dressing-gown) is ambushed in his house by two actors whose performances he has rubbished. Nice idea.
No civilised person knows who John Humphrys is. I’ve looked into it and I discover he’s rather a sad case — an insomniac who telephones politicians at dawn and interrupts them while they’re still half asleep. This strange career has won him celebrity among the restless multitude who, like him, insist on getting up in the middle of the night. It has also won him a book contract. His last work was about sloppy English. So is the new one, but as he unfurls his endless series of hastily written gibberish it becomes clear that he’s less interested in inarticulacy than he is in his jumble sale of parochial antipathies.
The luvvies are in uproar. Just listen to the din. ‘Horrified,’ says Dame Judi Dench. ‘Disgraceful,’ spits Sir Peter Hall. Equity’s spokesman is officially ‘astonished’ and Sir Donald Sinden calls it ‘absurd’. They’re talking about the imminent closure of the V&A’s Theatre Museum in Covent Garden. The museum has been open since 1987 and it houses a vast collection of costumes, scenery, photographs, scripts and theatre paraphernalia from the past three centuries. But the space is in need of a major overhaul. Two attempts to cadge a multimillion pound grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund have failed, and now the V&A has decided it’s had enough.
Always recommended is the Arts Theatre, one of the West End’s loveliest venues. Being a small-scale joint, it’s not much of a cash-mine and its crusty fabric is in urgent need of a refit. The place keeps closing for repairs and then reopening a year later completely untouched. I like that. The bar is pricey but bright and spacious, and you can walk in off the street for a drink. The louche underlit auditorium has an air of cosy intimacy because the stalls have no central aisle and are arranged, church-hall-style, in one big square slab. The seats themselves are like old armchairs and as you sink into the bald velvet upholstery the rusty springs bleat pathetically back at you.
This is a wonderful book — lucid, funny, sharp, truthful, cheeky, generous, erudite, surprise-crammed, and emanating a delicious tang of sophisticated amusement. I would love to continue in this vein but I’m afraid I mustn’t. It’s just not right. You see, the book is a collection of literary columns written by Nick Hornby for an American magazine. Each month he reflects on whatever he happens to have been reading, and the editor has given him absolute freedom to clodhop where he will across the sods of literature provided he utters no word against any author. The editor means it. When Hornby badmouths some writer by accident he gets sin-binned for a month as punishment. Hence my reluctance to write a kind review of this collection of kind reviews. Damn kindness!
‘No thanks. Too much sex.’ Thus an elderly friend dismissed my offer to lend him John Stubbs’s compendious biography of John Donne. His fears are groundless. Stubbs tells us virtually nothing about the paramours who inspired Donne’s youthful poems, partly because no new information is available and partly because the poet’s exquisite testimony on the subject renders further details superfluous. Instead he focuses on Donne’s struggle with his religious conscience, a conflict which typifies the difficulties faced by England’s religious communities in the early 17th century.
The highlights of Brecht’s Life of Galileo are packed into the opening hour. As the astronomer glimpses new worlds through his telescope, we get a palpable sense of his wonder and astonishment. The effect of these revelations on the mediaeval mind comes through in simple, thundering utterances. ‘The moon has no light of its own.’ ‘The earth is a star like any other.’ ‘Heaven has been abolished.’ It’s thrilling to see aeons of Aristotelian tradition being shattered and remade in the space of a couple of cloudless evenings on an Italian hillside. But the play drags once Galileo comes into conflict with the Church. The Faith versus Reason ding-dong becomes wordy and repetitive.
Great writers are never that great close up. Ralph Pite’s revealing biography of Thomas Hardy focuses on the emotional character of the poet and novelist. He comes across as difficult, snobbish, tight-fisted, self-centred, hypocritical, and, worst of all, ungrateful to those who helped him in the early stages of his career. The great champion of the rural poor was a mean and petty-minded employer. He never tipped his servants. He interfered constantly with minor building alterations. And if the grate was stacked too high he would remove surplus coals and lay them on the fender as a rebuke to the maid. Though his works suggest an abiding interest in women’s rights, he was opposed to female suffrage.
Listing page content here As the large publishers get fatter, richer and duller, the little ones get nippier, sharper and more vigorous. Roy Kerridge is the author of many books, but none of the grand publishing houses wanted this eccentric and highly personal guide to Britain, presumably because it lacks the amenable and forgettable polish of most travel books. Kerridge is charming, opinionated and a little bit mad. Excellent company, therefore. A lifelong ‘non- driver’, he strolls the lanes and by-ways of Britain with a stick, ‘cutting the heads off stinging nettles with clever whisks’, and singing ‘Zippety Doodah’, ‘useful for frightening wild creatures out into the open’.
Listing page content here Good and evil slug it out in Paradise Lost. Good triumphs, just about. So, too, in the Oxford Stage Company’s version of Milton’s epic, where flashes of brilliance overcome a few choppy patches. The staging is simple and sometimes powerful but the costumes are a poor blend of mediaeval pastiche and modern party-gear ripped up and spattered with blood. The ensemble playing is very strong and at least one of the visual settings — where Satan surveys the solar system — is extraordinarily beautiful. But the text has been fiddled with a lot. I was surprised by unMiltonic phrases like ‘Let us recognise’ and when I got home I checked my 1674 edition, with its wonderfully gnarled spellings.
When he wrote Enemies, Gorky was in love. The object of his desire was the artistry of Chekhov and this 1906 play is his attempt to emulate the master’s theatrical style. Copying from geniuses is risky. Any attempt is doomed, so it’s remarkable that Gorky fails so successfully. He reproduces Chekhov’s entire theatrical caboodle, the bubbling samovars, the smocked peasants, the candles glimmering through the silver birches, the bickering, lounging, drunken toffs, and to all this he adds an element of revolutionary prophecy. A local factory-owner stands up to Marxist agitators, but when he closes down the factory he is murdered by a mob.