This is an intriguing and valuable revival with some very solid performances at its heart. I am not fully persuaded that this double-bill has earned a lasting niche in the repertory, but the performers make a persuasive and consistently attractive case for it.
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.
Quite simply, it is one of the most perfectly conceived, cast and executed productions of a musical on any stage anywhere in the world. It’s shocking, brutal, brilliant and beautiful, all at once; like any good date, it is sexy, funny, serious and well worth a whole hearted investment
So for all the efforts of the actors to make their characters more rounded and sympathetic this play tells us more about the anger in the air after the events of 2008 than it gives pointers to how we should think of the world of Canary Wharf in the future.
The choreography is by far the strongest aspect of Thriller; it is inventive, exhilarating and almost exhausting to watch. It incorporates the traditional Jackson moves (including the moonwalks) whilst still providing a fresh, fun and radical approach.
Central to the power of the the production is the exquisite casting of the two doomed lovers, Eddie and May. Nina Arianda, a fan of this play since her very youngest days, is utterly superb as Eddie. Powerfully sensual, impossibly attractive, but just as impossibly earthy and ordinary, Arianda presents a deeply physiological performance which plays out through intense physical theatre. Remarkably, Sam Rockwell matches Arianda’s intensity and notches it up a level. He exudes a sexual intensity which is overwhelming, laces it with pain and indecision and then overlays that with testosterone cowboy tropes which somehow seem utterly fresh, real and dangerous.
It is clear from the start that this play – which runs straight through for eighty minutes – is potentially a drama about coming-out and sexual initiation, and indeed it becomes both of those things. But it is a tribute to the skill of the writing and the actors that it becomes a lot more than that too.
This reimagining of The Great Gatsby has to be commended for trying something very new and different. However, the musical innovations generally distracted from rather than enhanced the text; it was the brilliant source material and some solid acting performances that really made it sing.
