UFO Info Week-End

As Goneril Suzanne Burden belies her sleek appearance with broad gestures and

As Goneril, Suzanne Burden belies her sleek appearance with broad gestures and rictus grins, looking like Joan Rivers doing a parody of a Nancy Reagan. David Ryall’s dear old boy of a Gloucester sounds as well as looks, in his three-piece suit and watch chain, several generations older than his bastard son, who has the voice of a smugly amoral media expert. James Frain’s Edmund, however, is one of the few onstage who speaks verse persuasively, and his voluptuous-but-shy pleasure at his villainy is very amusing. Rather more uncouth is the supposedly nobler son: as Edgar, Tom Hollander handles the text as clumsily as he does his sword. This Lear indeed represents the present-day world, but not in the way Kent intended – rather, as a portrait of individualism and huge intentions gone badly wrong.To 20 April (020-7359 4404) A version of this review appeared in later editions of Wednesday’s paper. You know the story of the doting mother at a military parade who nudges her neighbour and says, “Just look at that.

Everybody’s out of step but our Johnny.” I had a rather similar experience watching Ramin Gray’s wonderful production of Push Up, a drolly dark comedy of office politics by the German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig. The play is topped and tailed by monologues delivered from the perspective of, respectively, a male and a female security guard in the skyscraper of an unnamed global corporation. But Gray has punctuated the proceedings proper (edgy duologues between rival colleagues) with two sequences where the guards arrive for work and change into their uniforms – a digital clock monitoring for us the exact lengths of this epically prosaic process.
There’s a lovely deadpan effrontery to detaining an audience for the three minutes it takes the man to perform his locker-room transformation, and the two it takes the woman. What makes the episodes all the funnier is that they are accompanied by music that is a combination of woozy lushness and crackpot relentlessness.

Even more killing was the fact that I seemed to be the only person in the audience keeling over with laughter. I’m still not sure I was supposed to be.The play proper cracks off with a sequence reminiscent, in its ultra-modern way, of the fan-twirling scenes in Restoration comedy, where two bitchy women do one another down. We find two power-suited female executives, engaged in synchronised action on swivel-lever chairs separated by a forbidding desk. The issue is that the younger one (Lucy Whybrow) has been turned down for a posting by her superior (Sian Thomas). The common denominator, or so the latter thinks, is her husband, Kramer, the company’s numero uno.