Lloyd Evans

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 and announces that he wants personal control of the export licences. (Does that sound likely? On stage it seems so loaded with improbabilities that it’s hard to see the play over the top of the pile.) Prof. B. is worried that his gizmo may fall into the hands of nutcase states like (who else?) the US and Israel. Instead he suggests handing the innovation to the European Union. Hmmm. Imagine the EU trying to fire a new weapon.

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 Cup in 1974. But with the passage of time one star begins to shine more brilliantly in the firmament. You probably haven’t heard of Franz Xaver Kroetz (b. Munich 1946). His work is elusive, undemonstrative and highly subtle and he specialises in unglamorous family dramas. His method was experimental back in the 70s. He interspersed lengthy dramatic scenes with sudden brief snapshots of his characters in revealing attitudes.

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 house lights are dimmed during a show is to create an atmosphere of anonymous intimacy in which every member of the audience can half-imagine that they’re watching the play alone. Doing it in the round kills that subtlety. You have to stare, through the shapes of the perambulating actors, at a wraparound panorama of unfamiliar faces.

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 drawl still has a touch of magic. But her part is a dud cheque. We’ve spent the first act watching a group of drunken sophisticates swapping caustic banter. Sam’s wife Jo is suffering from some lethal disease which frees her from all social constraint and prompts an enjoyable, if undemanding, hour of drawing-room comedy. Enter Elizabeth.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.