The Hunt at the Almeida, or, Focused on the Wrong Story

Note: This is a review of the performance on Monday 15th July 2019.

This is the second London play in recent months focused on child sexual abuse. As an exploration of that subject it is less effective than the recent Downstate at the National which in turn was less effective than David Harrower's superb EIF commission Blackbird back in 2005. However, there is also a second narrative here exploring how Tobias Menzies (Lucas) interacts, or struggles to interact, emotionally with others. Menzies's character in this regard is a type of man I feel we don't see that often on stage, and in the rare moments of stillness and character-led drama his struggle really moves. Would that the play had focused on that narrative.

Instead, of course, this adaptation of a Danish film (I haven't seen the original so can't comment on how convincing it is by comparison) is primarily concerned with the accusation of abuse and the community's reaction to it. I have no idea whether such an accusation would play out in this way in reality, all I can say is that the play pretty much failed to convince me that it would. The child's accusation is treated unquestioningly - indeed it is difficult not to feel that the first investigator manipulates the alleged victim by his approach to questioning. The inadequacy of the process in relation to the accused struck me forcefully and, as tensions rise, the complete absence of police protection for an accused whose vulnerability is evident for some time before the increasingly deranged community acts just does not convince.

Peter Gynt at the National, or, Another Flawed Epic

Note: This is a review of the matinee on Saturday 13th July 2019.

In recent years one strand of Edinburgh International Festival theatre programming has been securing higher profile co-production partnerships in the English-speaking theatre world. The idea is admirable but the results have been mixed. The last link up with a major London house (the Old Vic) two years ago produced the disappointing epic The Divide. This year Edinburgh audiences will soon be visited by a new version of another epic - Ibsen's Peter Gynt, this time in co-production with the National Theatre. In advance the show had one clearly positive element - the casting of James McArdle as the lead following his magnificent performance in Angels in America. But there were also question marks - the last Ibsen Jonathan Kent directed at the National - the epic Emperor and Galilean was flawed, most of adaptor David Hare's recent work has been, from where I've been sitting, undistinguished, and the designing of a production that would work equally well in the Olivier and the Edinburgh Festival Theatre did not strike me as straightforward. Sadly, this proved to be a disappointing afternoon.

The one saving grace of the show is James McArdle who makes a valiant, though ultimately vain effort to bring it to life. He has great presence and energy. He ages strikingly - the old, embittered Scotsman of the last act is a particularly fine piece of work. But he failed finally to make me care enough about Peter, or to conceal the considerable flaws of the rest of the show. Credit is also due to Oliver Ford Davies, whose delivery brings a welcome authority to the concluding scenes. Jonathan Coy finds occasional sparks as Bertram. The rest of the ensemble work hard but none of them make a particularly strong impression, though this may be to some extent a consequence of the adaptation or Ibsen's original.