The Best Man
Playhouse Theatre, London Until May 26 2hrs 20 mins
Some things never change. American elections, for example, as this near 60-year-old play about two candidates slugging it out for the American presidency demonstrates. The writing is wise, waspish and insider-ish. Just what you’d expect from the acidic Gore Vidal.
Martin Shaw plays William Russell, the principled Secretary running for President at the 1960 Democratic Convention. His trouble is that he can’t keep his trousers on (just like John F Kennedy), and he’s had a mental breakdown the press doesn’t know about.
The writing is wise, waspish and insider-ish. Just what you’d expect from the acidic Gore Vidal. Above: Honeysuckle Weeks, Maureen Lipman and Glynis Barber
Senator Cantwell is played by Jeff Fahey, all teeth and Brylcreem, an unscrupulous Southerner, a family man who ‘pours God over everything like ketchup’
His brash rival is Senator Cantwell (played by Jeff Fahey, all teeth and Brylcreem), an unscrupulous Southerner, a family man who ‘pours God over everything like ketchup’ and who has his own skeletons rattling in the closet.
In Cantwell you hear the chest-thumping of Trump. He’ll use any dirty trick to smear his opponent. But will the more noble Russell hit back with what he knows?
Hobbling between the two candidates is Wycliffe star Jack Shepherd as the lame old President, oozing mortality from every pore.
As the matriarchal representative of ‘the women voters’, Maureen Lipman casts a beady eye about like an escaped goose. She’s great value, though sadly she waddles off for good after livening up Act One.
There are also fine performances from Honeysuckle Weeks, as the shallow chatterbox Mrs Cantwell, and from Glynis Barber, whose loyal public poise hides a decayed but fond marriage to the philandering Russell. The action is all set in a hotel suite and the raucous press gaggle outside the door is reminiscent of that lovely old screwball newspaper comedy The Front Page.
Dated it may be, yet The Best Man is also a real crystal ball of a play, predicting the total moral debasement of today’s political climate. Very well acted, it’s recommended if witty, astute old Broadway plays are your thing.
Macbeth
Olivier stage, National Theatre, London Until June 23, 2hrs 30mins
Rating: 
Here, Macbeth’s castle is a tiny caff off the A9. Just the place for Rory Kinnear’s ‘white van man’ Thane of Cawdor, who sounds like he’s up from the South delivering a load of glottal stops.
Anne-Marie Duff’s Lady Macbeth (above) forms a sort of partnership with Rory Kinnear (also above) but it’s oddly uninvolving
Indeed this horror poem, staged in anoraks, is a nightmare done in Geordie, Scouse, Yorkshire and God knows what accents. (All part of director Rufus Norris’s dogged inclusivity and equality agenda.) Only Stephen Boxer’s King Duncan is carefully enunciated. As a result, he sounds like John Gielgud caught in a pub fight.
Anne-Marie Duff’s Lady Macbeth forms a sort of partnership with Kinnear but it’s oddly uninvolving.
And I can’t say I felt very sorry when Banquo (Kevin Harvey) got the chop. His bloody ghost lurches about the stage like an alcoholic in an A&E ward.
The dead creepy voodoo witches are a trump card and the jittery soundscape of ambient malice is also very effective. But the only serious murder going on here is that of the English language.
Fanny & Alexander
The Old Vic, London Until April 14 3hrs 30mins
Rating: 
Fanny & Alexander – based on Ingmar Bergman’s classic 1982 film – is set in 1907 and tells a story through the eyes of a young girl and boy whose family runs a theatre in a Swedish town.
The children’s father dies and life goes from a dream to a nightmare when their mother marries a cold, disciplinarian bishop.
The cast here is terrific. Above: Kevin Doyle as the cruel stepfather and Catherine Walker as Emilie Ekdahl
The zig-zagging adventure has a Hamlet-like ghost, lip-smacking family feasts, servants, love affairs and a kidnapping. Above: Walker with Lolita Chakrabarti
The zig-zagging adventure has a Hamlet-like ghost, lip-smacking family feasts, servants, love affairs and a kidnapping. Though this version is long (with two intervals), Max Webster, directing a thronging cast of 24, doesn’t ever allow you to be bored.
Fans might miss the film’s close-ups and its amazing contrasts. But the cast here is terrific. Penelope Wilton is the imperious but kindly grandmother; Kevin Doyle (her fellow Downton Abbey actor) the cruel stepfather. Michael Pennington – the Jewish family friend – is another of the show’s trump cards, as is Jonathan Slinger as the dissipated uncle you can’t help loving.
Adapted by Stephen Beresford, this lush, haunting bedtime story unfolds in the sumptuous Old Vic as if it was written for it.
A Princess Undone
Park Theatre, London Until Sat, 1hr 40mins
Rating:
This play about Princess Margaret unfortunately arrives in the wake of Netflix’s The Crown – Margaret is one of its many joys – and Craig Brown’s sparkling biography, Ma’am Darling. Nightmare she may have been, but was Margaret really as tiresome as she is here?
We meet her in Kensington Palace in 1993, a self-pitying, frosty old boot guzzling scotch and slagging off Diana and fellow Royals (Princess Michael of Kent is called ‘rent a Kent’) as she prepares a bonfire of letters that might embarrass the family – and herself. Felicity Dean’s Margaret – swathed in pearls and fag smoke – trades insults with Billy the butler, played by the show’s author, Richard Stirling, plumping the cushions as if he is in a very camp sitcom.
The second half is livened up by the arrival of John Bindon (Patrick Toomey), a bit of criminal rough from Margaret’s past whose party trick of hanging beer mugs from his manhood is alluded to. But their scene together goes nowhere much.
Margaret clearly suffered from a lifetime of second billing and cloying self-pity. No one can accuse her, though, of lacking a waspish wit. I liked her description of a relative being like ‘Tugboat Annie as she goes from peer to peer’.