Lloyd Evans

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.

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.

‘Quelle catastrophe.’ Thus Samuel Beckett on hearing that he had won the Nobel Prize in 1969. He would doubtless have been similarly disdainful of the events arranged to mark his centenary, which falls on 13 April. A disregard for fame and success, and even for his followers, was one of Beckett’s artistic hallmarks and it stems from his extraordinarily painful and prolonged emergence as an author. Why care about his reputation or his readers? For half of his life he had none. He was born in 1906, to prosperous Dublin Protestants, and educated at Portora, the same school as Oscar Wilde. He was an all-rounder.

Southwark Fair by Samuel Adamson. Ever heard of it? Nor me but it sounds like a sprawling comedy of manners written by some forgotten Enlightenment wag. I trotted along to the Cottesloe full of expectation but I was in for a let-down. Samuel Adamson is no wag. Nor is he enlightened. And as for forgotten, well, it won’t take long. The play, staged on the South Bank of the Thames, is also set on the South Bank of the Thames. Good idea? Possibly. But as the action unfolds you quickly see what trouble the author has given himself by disregarding one of the basic conventions of drama. Most plays are set in the home or the workplace.

What was I thinking? A fortnight ago I berated the hammy, eggy, lardy, puddingy acting style of the RSC. Well, here’s a play where grandiosity, exaggeration and overemphasis are perfectly suited to the material. It’s the early days of the Roman Empire. Tiberius has retreated to the sun-kissed paradise of Capri in order to murder and eat children, or whatever he got up to there. His dominions have fallen into the hands of Sejanus, a psychotic upstart with imperial ambitions. Barry Stanton plays Tiberius as an avuncular devil with a voice as rich and smooth as a cup of hot chocolate. It’s hard to imagine this cuddly old bear warming his feet, as Tiberius was said to do, in the slit bellies of freshly slaughtered girls.