Whilst Wilde’s intelligent witticisms are successfully displayed here, and despite there being some good performances, ‘A Woman of No Importance’ feels far too long, and a sense of momentum and buzz is missing.
Love In Idleness Apollo Theatre 18th May 2017 3 Stars Book Tickets Recently, there has been a spate of interest in Terence Rattigan’s masterpiece, ‘The Deep Blue Sea’, with high-profile revivals, a new film, and even a brilliant new play, Mike Poulton’s, ‘Kenny’, based on both the real events that suggested it and also on the meticulously crafted drama that arose from their ashes. So it was probably only a matter of time before someone got around to wheeling out his collection of sketches for the later, much more fully realised and successful play, the work that is known by a peculiar reference to Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ that now finds itself upgrading from the Menier Chocolate Factory in this show relocation to Shaftesbury Avenue. Promoted – in Bob King’s carefully arranged graphic design – as a three-hander between a young man, Michael Brown, a woman in the prime … Read more
Where Hodge does elect for difference is in the manner of playing. No low-key, slow boil quiet broiling here. No, the parts are played with vigour, brasher than you would expect to see on an English stage or one that thought Pinter was wrapped in mothballs. The result is the sexy edge is more angular, the stakes are higher, the comedy quite a bit funnier. All deliberately so. It reaps rewards often, but perhaps best of all in the sequence where the theft of underwear is discussed, or the body in the bed is remembered or the show tunes are so badly serviced. This is brave on Hodge’s part looked at one way; looked at another, it is simply just doing it.
Eve Best might not be the greatest actress to have played Cleopatra, or the one with the greatest voice. But she created an indelible, voraciously sexual, politically infantile Queen of Egypt which will haunt the memory for years to come.
