Football is a subject close to Patrick Marber's heart. He's a lifelong Arsenal fan and during his sojourn away from London (and writing, as he was suffering from writer's block for much of it) in Sussex, he became involved with his local non-league team, Lewes, helping to establish it as a community-owned club in 2010.
Between Light Shining in Buckinghamshire and Everyman it was beginning to look like we were never going to get a proper, uncomplicated laugh in Rufus Norris’s National Theatre. Thank goodness for Restoration comedy, stepping into the breach as reliably as it did with The Man of Mode in 2007 (who could forget Rory Kinnear’s Sir Fopling Flutter?). Throwing everything and the ancestral silver at the play, director Simon Godwin delivers an evening generous with wit, joy and affection.
At just 26, Pippa Bennett-Warner has already achieved many actors’ goals, from treading the boards at the National and having a part written specially for her to sharing scenes with luminaries like Derek Jacobi and Eddie Redmayne. She debuted aged 11 as one of the young Nalas in The Lion King, but since graduating from RADA, she has focussed on “straight acting”.
As we stagger towards electoral chaos, isn’t it comforting to think there might be a master plan at work? That Russell Brand’s meddling is preordained, or Cameron’s "brain fade" an act of divine intervention?
The trouble with the general election is that while everybody talks about money, nobody talks about ideas. We know the price of everything, but the value of nothing. This might seem to be a triumphant demonstration of the essential pragmatism of the nation, yet there was a time in English history when ideas mattered. And when they were passionately discussed, and bitterly fought over. I’m referring to the English Civil War of the 1640s, and its aftermath when king Charles I was beheaded, an era explored by Caryl Churchill in her 1976 docudrama.
From Singin’ in the Rain and Anything Goes to Hello, Dolly! and Mary Poppins, Olivier Award winner Stephen Mear has done more than any other British choreographer to usher classic musicals into the modern era. But adept as he is at razzle-dazzling ’em, there’s more to Mear, as recent excursions like City of Angels at Donmar Warehouse and Die Fledermaus for the Metropolitan Opera prove.
The seasonal family reunion play is a hardy perennial. Like the Christmas tree that must take its place on the stage, it is usually spiky, dry and decorated with glittering ornaments – as in acidic jokes, acute embarrassments and ghastly revelations. Into every yuletide family a stranger must come, and all the most careful preparations must be ruined. Normally, everyone gets drunk, food gets thrown and truths get told. But if these are the rules of the genre, how does Sam Holcroft’s new drama bend them, and play with them?
How do you take your rom-coms? Full-fat Hollywood schmaltz, Shakespearean, or lean and elegant – a Stoppard perhaps, or Coward? If your answer did not include “With lashings of social philosophy, ethics and a lengthy dream sequence, preferably running north of three hours”, then Man and Superman might not be the play for you.
We are sitting in the lobby of the National Theatre in the early afternoon waiting for the photocall for Dara to begin. Six or seven photographers, one woman, all dressed in jeans and dark jackets with large camera bags, some on wheels. There is not much conversation. As a relative newcomer I don't normally speak, but on this occasion I venture a remark.
“I have seen this play.”
After a pause one of the company says, “You're keen.”
I explain that I went to a preview. Another silence then, “In one sentence, what's it about?”
“It's about Sharia law.”
Here's the genuine hard problem facing commentators confronted with Tom Stoppard's new play of the same name: how do you honour the legacy of this extraordinary writer's first play in nine years that also marks its director Nicholas Hytner's National Theatre swansong and is – truth be told – a disappointment on multiple fronts?