This is bad news. How could Tanika Gupta, who wrote The Waiting Room and Gladiator Games, write such a dreary, cliché-ridden play, full of soppy moralising and sitcom humour? How could the Royal Court, basking in its 50th-anniversary year, put it on? Or is it one of those depressing stories of a writer presenting a play and the powers that be muscling in to “develop it”, for which read giving it a harmless, politically correct message, then developing it to death? Gupta’s story is about sex tourism. Four women come to Jamaica. Though one of them, an English girl, is in search of the Jamaican father she has never met, and another, black British, has been coming here for years to continue an affair, the other two, a Londoner and a Mancunian, want action, and there’s no shortage of willing studs. The characters, including a wise old woman and an unscrupulous pimp who is ashamed of his trade, have next to no personality; their only function is to deliver the unsurprising message that a multi-culti population is no guarantee of multi-culti happiness. One star JP
The 39 Steps
Tricycle
After nearly a century and three movie versions, John Buchan’s stiff-upper-lip thriller remains a popular classic, so if you’re going to be jokey about it, you’d better do it with some warmth. Thankfully, this clever and witty adaptation by Patrick Barlow, which owes most to Hitchcock’s 1935 film, takes our affection for the story and characters for granted. The result is a hugely entertaining, escapist two hours that, under Maria Aitken’s direction, manages to have its fun without resorting to camp. It’s also a workout for the four actors, who play 150 roles between them. As the lantern-jawed hero, Richard Hannay, Charles Edwards — looking, appropriately enough, like a young Anthony Eden — vitally keeps a straight face throughout, while Catherine McCormack slips easily from overripe vamp to uptight love interest. Playing the supporting cast of bumbling detectives, Scottish landladies and supersmooth spies, Rupert Degas and Simon Gregor offer a virtual masterclass in comic character acting. All in all, thoroughly ripping. Four stars PW
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Macbeth
Hampton Court Palace and Lincoln’s Inn Fields
Chris Pickles’s Oxford Shakespeare Company production is packed with heartfelt, raw energy — so raw that it often disrupts the text. Staging Macbeth in Hampton Court’s Great Hall was a good idea, but playing it lengthwise in the middle, with the audience on either side, was not; it loses the advantage of the excellent acoustics. Guilt and soul-searching are among the play’s themes, and the big-volume voices, with little sense of intimacy, do not help. Max Digby’s Macbeth is a young man who looks forward in anger: he’s driven, but lacks the sense of being haunted. He’s a lion on the battlefield, but you can’t imagine him having visions, or much of the milk of human kindness. Two stars JP