Matt Trueman

There’s a moment, mid-interview, when Chiwetel Ejiofor and I get our wires crossed. All I’m trying to do is to make a reference to politics. There’s an election coming up, and he’s about to star on the National Theatre stage in ‘Everyman’, a fifteenth-century morality play about man’s powerlessness in the face of death. It strikes me that a lot of his roles have been disenfranchised characters – an illegal immigrant (‘Dirty Pretty Things’); a drag queen (‘Kinky Boots’); the frustrated brother of a drug boss (‘American Gangster’). Most famously, Solomon Northup, the free man forced into slavery in ‘12 Years a Slave’. But when I suggest this, his hackles rise. I realise he thinks I’m asking a question about race: maybe nudging him towards a rant about the predominance of low-status roles for black actors. Is Ejiofor so braced for a question on the subject that he’s answering one of his own? If he is, you can’t really blame him. The runaway success of ‘12 Years’ has catapulted the Oscar-nominated Londoner into Hollywood’s major league. As the lead in one of the most important films ever about race, Ejiofor’s inevitably found himself a spokesman for the issue. Today, he’s back on home turf – it was strong performances at the National which helped launch Ejiofor’s career. Audiences getting ready to see ‘Everyman’ can expect an electric experience: on stage he’s a phenomenal presence. But in person, beneath the easy chatshow charm, there’s something guarded about Ejiofor. He doesn’

This review is of the production's 2011 run. It returns for 2016 with Dan Frost again playing Roger Hilton. There was almost a movie of Roger Hilton’s life with John Hurt playing the obscure abstract artist. Thank heavens his story found playwright Eddie Elks, whose portrait of the painter outstrips mere biography. Dazzlingly eloquent yet always just beyond sense, ‘Botallack O’Clock’ is a stunning miniature; surprising, profound and very very funny. Roger Hilton spent his last decade in self-imposed hermitage, confined to a squalid basement in which he slept and worked, dashing out several poster-paint gouaches in a day. Surrounded by paint pots and whisky bottles, he sits beneath a low-hanging light, chain-smoking and talking to his radio, imagining himself as a guest on ‘Desert Island Discs’. ‘This is a crocodile,’ he says, introducing one of his paintings, ‘Eating my wife.’ At its simplest, ‘Botallack O’Clock’ is a study of the fine line between genius and insanity. The joy is in its strange yet sage philosophy. Hilton tells it as he sees it, rambling through nutty but lucid nuggets in a voice like Alan Bennett’s best Michael Caine impression. The effect is something like ‘Test Match Special’ suffering from heatstroke: woozy and delirious but purring on, always impeccably English. The production, from Third Man Theatre and the Half Moon’s grassroots fringe company Pilotlight, boasts a phenomenal and uncompromising performance from Dan Frost. Frost inhabits the role far bey

The newsreel footage is indelible. Piles of dead cattle burning, hooves sticking out of the flames. Hedgerows draped in hazard tape. Men in white chemsuits milling around. Bea Roberts’s play, joint winner of Theatre 503’s new playwrighting award, takes us into the very heart of the foot and mouth pandemic of 2001 and argues that agriculture never really recovered. Nightjars are, after all, an omen of death.Set in a Devonshire cowshed – with a design by Max Dorey that’s so life-like you half-suspect the theatre’s started dairy farming as a daytime sideline – ‘Nightjars’ follows old-time farmer Michael (David Fielder) and local vet Jeff (Nigel Hastings) over a decade, from a calving to a cull and onwards. That Michael’s herd, his ‘girls’, are named after the royal family is all the symbolism you need.You feel deeply for both men. Michael, simple-hearted and all at sea, lost his wife not long ago. Jeff’s in the process of losing his. He sleeps on a camp bed in the study and carries a hipflask. Both lose their lot: their families, their livelihoods, everything they’ve built up over years.In looking out for one another, these two broken men become an odd couple. Roberts suggests that a kind of peace is possible for them – and there’s some hope in that – but it’s always more a matter of making do than mending, let alone moving on. It’s tender, beautifully balanced writing, and Paul Robinson’s elegiac production serves it well. Sally Ferguson’s eloquent lighting shows the passing of