Ulster American review: Woody Harrelson's got A-lister troubles, writes PATRICK MARMION

Ulster American (Riverside Studios, London)

Verdict: Joyfully offensive 

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Rock 'N' Roll (Hampstead Theatre, London)

Verdict: Vintage Stoppard

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London taxi drivers better look out. When Woody Harrelson was in town doing a play back in 2002, he destroyed an ashtray while escaping from the back of a cab and was pursued by cops through Sloane Square. It became the subject of his 2017 film, Lost In London.

Now, the erstwhile hellraiser, self-styled anarchist, marijuana missionary and sugar-free vegan, best known for Cheers and Natural Born Killers, is back in another play — alongside The Lord Of The Rings' Gollum, Andy Serkis, and Derry Girls' Louisa Harland.

But if you think you can afford one of the few remaining seats (going for a shocking £120-£175) you had better be warned that David Ireland's play is mightily and joyfully offensive.

It's about a Hollywood A-lister booked to appear in a West End play... about a deranged Northern Irish Unionist paramilitary.

Meeting in the living room of the director (Serkis), Harrelson's character, Jay Conway, is thrilled by the fictional script's mixture of 'truth and unrelenting violence'.

The writer (Harland) is overcome with excitement, too — until she discovers that Jay is ignorant of Northern Irish political history, wants to wear an eye patch and has an accent so bad he sounds like 'Dick Van Morrison'.

There is one particularly hilarious (and obscene) line referencing Liza Minnelli's love of swearing which I could repeat only to a close friend. And then preferably in writing.

But the brilliance of Ireland's play is that he's spotted that the global obsession with identity politics, from Beverly Hills to Belfast, is making the world as volatile as Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

Were he not vegan, you might say that Harrelson devours his role like raw meat. Believing himself to be under contract to a power greater than himself, his Jay is a tanned Californian hippy in silk palazzo pants, handknit cardigan and printed shawl.

He deploys a creepy Donald Trump pout and is gloriously, inappropriately, touchy-feely. Prowling the stage like a yogic mime-artist, the 62-year-old is clearly in phenomenal shape, too — at one point launching into a full unsupported handstand.

Serkis, with his rugger-ball head wreathed in grey hair like a porcupine, guzzles pints of red wine and folds himself into physical contortions as he tries to keep Jay onside during his incendiary speculations on 'the N-word' (never used in full), and forays into radical feminism. 'He's not an adult,' Serkis reminds Harland. 'He's an actor!'

Harland, in Jeremy Herrin's immaculately painful production, gives both these Hollywood big beasts the full, Northern Irish roasting they deserve. At first so keen to meet Jay that she seems desperate for the loo, she grows cold and angry before throwing caution to the wind and unleashing a Jacobean bloodbath.

Who would Tom Stoppard be if he were a rock star? In his dreams, I bet he's the clever, reclusive Syd Barrett from Pink Floyd.

His love of Barrett and 'The Floyd' is well known from interviews, and it's amply set out in this revival of his 2006 play about the role of rock in the demise of Eastern Bloc communism (starring Nathaniel Parker, Nancy Carroll and Three Musketeers heartthrob Jacob Fortune-Lloyd).

Stoppard's hero Jan (modelled on the author and played here by the puppy-eyed Fortune-Lloyd) is a bright but bashful Czech-émigré philosophy lecturer in Cambridge in the 1960s.

His English mentor, Max (Parker), is a Communist Party diehard, and both are under surveillance by Colin Tierney's sinister Czech secret policeman, who is anxious to suppress freedom-lovin' rock'n'roll.

Carroll plays Max's fiery wife who's dying of cancer and — later — her daughter Esme, who dotes on Jan.

Never mind Syd Barrett, there's more than a touch of Jon Anderson's guitar solos from the prog rock band Yes in Stoppard's capacity for riffing at length on almost any subject.

He runs a mind-boggling scale from political idealism in Czech politics (1968-1989) to the textual analysis of the ancient Greek lesbian poet Sappho, while strumming freely on the nature of consciousness before tackling moral responsibility in tabloid journalism.

Played in traverse formation with the audience either side of the stage, and using the same few bits of furniture for Prague and Cambridge, it's easy to lose track of who's who and where's where in Nina Raine's production.

But the play still glitters with Stoppard's wit, including a line about how the Czech Ministry of the Interior is so called because it monitors what's going on inside people's heads.

Or the one about how kids today think a fascist is a mounted policeman in Grosvenor Square.

Aside from that, I reckon the secret of the play's success could be the sneaky dash of Barry Manilow cheese in its three love-story subplots.

These star-crossed Polish lovers will break your heart

By Georgina Brown 

Cold War (Almeida Games Theatre, London)

Verdict: A sad tale for Christmas 

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The Fair Maid Of The West (Swan Theatre, Stratford)

Verdict: Fun down the pub 

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Forget Christmas cheer. More potent by far is the cheerlessness of a chilly village hall in Soviet-controlled Poland in 1949, where youngsters are auditioning for song-and-dance ensembles designed to showcase the glories of traditional Polish folklore. Or so the slimy fixer Kaczmarek (Elliot Levey) claims.

Does music director Viktor (a wonderful, withheld Luke Thallon) fall in love at first sight with Anya Chalotra's breathtakingly brazen, insolent Zula? Or is it when they sing together for the first time, capturing one another's rhythms to perfection? Whatever, their passion is scorching.

But tragedy hangs in the air as surely as the dense cigarette smoke. That's partly suggested by the Polish folk music, often about the devil and always melancholic yet defiant, as well as Elvis Costello's tender, haunting ballads, specially composed for this play and exquisitely heightening the emotion. But it also stems from the tension in a country under occupation where individuals must choose collaboration, acquiescence or defection. And trust is dead.

Conor McPherson's first play since his dazzling Girl From The North Country is as bleakly beautiful as the sumptuous version by Polish filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski that inspired it. Its central theme — star-crossed lovers who can't live with (or without) each other because of the emotional baggage they're dragging behind them — is a familiar one. But it goes deeper, revealing the desperate and irrevocable effects of war on its survivors.

The play stutters a tad to its conclusion but, as ever, director Rupert Goold creates searing images: Polish dancers whirling, stamping and clapping in scarlet and white in front of a huge portrait of Stalin; jazz bars in Paris where the careless Rock Around The Clock; lovers locked in life and death. Exceptional and unforgettable.

We're on a pub crawl of sorts, and a grimily authentic one at that, with bar furniture recycled from the Dirty Duck, across the road from the Swan.

Isobel McArthur's adaptation of The Fair Maid Of The West, by Shakespeare's contemporary Thomas Heywood, might be better titled The Barmaid Of The West.

Heywood's original boozer, the Castle Inn, has been downgraded to The Dog And A***hole, where Liz has grown up pulling a beer while lending an ear to the regulars with broken hearts — as well as those harping on about Europeans pushing up prices; and theatre these days being nothing but propaganda. Plus ça change, then.

Trouble — Crispin accidentally stabs fellow upper-class twit Tarquin — and a marriage proposal from another overprivileged twerp, Spencer, drive Liz (excellent Amber James) to Cornwall, where her hostelry The Open Arms makes a knitters' circle as much of an attraction as the ale. Then, successful but stricken by grief, she makes the bar into a boat and sets sail to a Spanish taverna hung with hams.

McArthur doesn't reboot Heywood's 1598 slack picaresque adventure in the same way that her Pride And Prejudice* (*Sort Of) ingeniously re-investigated Jane Austen's masterpiece from the point of view of five maids in white petticoats and black Dr Martens. So it's hard to know why the RSC has revisited this piece.

Still, romp meets romcom, making a competent romp-com from a play dismissed as 'drivel' by the scholar F. L. Lucas.

In the new work's refreshingly irreverent prologue, McArthur confesses that 'The liberties I took amidst these plunders/Would make an academic s*** his unders'.

Actually, it's nothing like that funny — but there is fitful merriment to be found in McArthur's winningly well-performed production, which mixes tracksuits and trainers with doublets and ruffs and, best of all, has a jukebox stocked with 1970s favourites.

Festive froth.

Michael Go, Less Trust and a limp satire

Pandemonium (Soho Theatre) 

Verdict: Dead Ringers without the zingers

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Boris Johnson supporters will be relieved to learn that Armando Iannucci's satire of the former PM and his term in office is just another show that once more fails to lay a glove on the armour-plated one.

The problem Iannucci faces is that what some people hate about Boris is exactly what everyone else loves. Cobbled together in the manner of a student revue, Pandemonium is best described as an Elizabethan version of Radio 4's Dead Ringers — without ringers like Jan Ravens and Jon Culshaw to skewer their targets. Instead of the scabrous omnishambles of Iannucci's TV shows such as The Thick Of It, it strikes a lofty but ineffectual literary tone.

Some of the name-calling is inventive. Boris's Cabinet includes Dominic Wrath and Michael Go (he never does). Chancellor Riches Sooner (aka 'the Rich Meister'), Less Trust (dressed as Queen Elizabeth I) and police chief Cressida Dick-Joke are more feeble.

Paul Chahidi's slimline Boris (or Orbis Rex) makes no real attempt at the wobbly-voiced blether, and the best turn is instead from Amalia Vitale as Matt Hemlock, a jungle swamp creature forever slipping on its own slime.

Join Cap'n Hook and the crew for some filthy fun

By Veronica Lee

Peter Pan (Palladium, London) 

Verdict: Smutty but nice 

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Dick Whittington (Richmond, London) 

Verdict: Couple of swells 

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Now in its eighth year, the Palladium pantomime is firmly established as the glitziest in the capital and continues to be a star magnet, this year boasting Jennifer Saunders making her panto debut as Captain Hook, joining a company led by Julian Clary and writer/director Michael Harrison.

As ever, it looks as if no expense has been spared (as it should, with top-price tickets costing a staggering £195).

As Seaman Smee, Clary delivers a barrage of smut ('I answer to Smee but I prefer Seaman' was the cleanest joke I could repeat here) and his scenes with the faux-offended Hook are a highlight. Filthily funny as he is, Saunders more than holds her own (it's catching); she's absolutely fabulous, in fact. The cast constantly break the fourth wall and are ribbed mercilessly by Clary, particularly Louis Gaunt as Peter Pan and Frances Mayli McCann as Wendy.

Clary also pays a sweet tribute in song to his friend and erstwhile Palladium panto colleague Paul O'Grady, who died earlier this year: a moment of genuine emotion in an evening otherwise played purely for laughs by the talented cast. The ensemble are terrific in the song-and-dance numbers, while returning regulars Gary Wilmot (as the Dame) sings beautifully and Nigel Havers and ventriloquist Paul Zerdin (as pirates) provide great comedy in a show that, as one character attests, has little plot to speak of. But who cares, when it's this much fun?

Until 14 January (palladium pantomime.com).

Dick Whittington at London's Richmond Theatre stars Paul Merton and Suki Webster (husband and wife in real life) as sweet shop owner Sarah The Cook and Suki The Sweet Maker.

They have lots of scenes together, which leaves less room than usual for song-and-dance numbers — possibly a good thing as Mr Merton, a rather sardonic Dame, is neither a singer nor a hoofer — but the couple have real comic rapport, helped by a strong script from Alan McHugh (though some gags are near the knuckle for a family show).

Jack Danson and Erin Sophie Halliday are charming as the lovers Dick Whittington and Alice Fitzwarren, and Vivien Parry is nicely villainous as Queen Rat. Mr McHugh has tinkered with the plot but it hangs together under Jonathan O'Boyle's direction, which moves things along nicely. Until January 7 (atgtickets.com).

Perfect gifts for the gamer in your life

By Peter Hoskin

As some guy once said, everything old is new again — and that's certainly true in video gaming.

The hottest Christmas gift of 1977, the Atari 2600, is now one of the hottest Christmas gifts of 2023, in a new, updated form.

The Atari 2600+ (note the plus-sign and the price: £99.99) is retro gaming done right.

This is a loving recreation of the original console, right down to its actual wooden frontage and its plastic cartridges for loading classic games such as Missile Command and Yars' Revenge.

But it's also full of modern conveniences, making it easy to plug it into your high-definition telly and experience the 1970s all over again — only better.

The Super Pocket (£49.99) isn't an old console brought back to life — but it is a charming, well-proportioned handheld that's stuffed full of old arcade titles.

It currently comes in two varieties: one for the games studio Taito (creators of Space Invaders) and one for Capcom (Street Fighter), though both can take cartridges to allow for dozens more golden oldies. Thanks to these, I've been lost to Puzzle Bobble this year.

Those present in the 21st century tell me that 2023 hasn't been too shabby for new games either.

If you are scrambling for a present for a gamer, then you couldn't do much better than one of the greatest games of all time: Baldur's Gate 3 (£49.99).

Or if they're more into superheroes than wizards, Spider- Man 2 (£69.99).

For the very youngest button-mashers — and their parents — there's even the delightful Bluey: The Videogame (£34.99).

Or perhaps you prefer a more tangible sort of play?

Magic: The Gathering, the game of fantasy card battles, celebrated its 30th birthday this year — and it's still going strong. Really strong, in fact.

Its recent Lord Of The Rings tie-in is a wonderful gateway to these endless realms.

Just buy the Tolkien fan in your life one of the Tales Of Middle-Earth Holiday Scene Boxes, and watch them go... back to the shadow. From whence they came.