Daily Mail Review - 19th February 2002
New plays are the theatre's lifeblood. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Let's count our losses. On a rainy night in Iceland, a cantankerous old businessman invites a complete stranger to share a feast of snails and talk about genetic inheritance.
I'll risk causing a further stampede at the box office by adding that the play is by Olaf Olafsson, one of Iceland's most applauded young novelists. It is like bad Ibsen with zero plausibility and a dramatic pulse rate that would disappoint even the amalgamated union of paint-drying watchers and slow-drip specialists. The businessman is played by David Warner, making his first appearance on the London stage for 30 years.
Once a spellbinding Hamlet for the Sixties, Warner has since popped up in various cult films from Straw Dogs to Titanic, a shadow of his youthful self. He's still only 60, and as Karl Johnson he is eminently watchable, even when ludicrously wielding an African spear collected on his travels. But his reactionary, entrepreneurial character does not suit his complex stage personality.
He is supposed to be dining in tandem with a bunch of epicureans in Paris, consuming snails with particular wines, surrounded by antique furniture and modern paintings. He allows Philip Glenister's bedraggled schoolmaster to join him for no other reason than that he turns up.
In Ron Daniels's stilted production, the rain outside is plainly dispensed by naff sprinklers, and bursts of Wagner punctuate thunder and lightning as in a bad thriller. Actually, I would have preferred a bad thriller.
I'll risk causing a further stampede at the box office by adding that the play is by Olaf Olafsson, one of Iceland's most applauded young novelists. It is like bad Ibsen with zero plausibility and a dramatic pulse rate that would disappoint even the amalgamated union of paint-drying watchers and slow-drip specialists. The businessman is played by David Warner, making his first appearance on the London stage for 30 years.
Once a spellbinding Hamlet for the Sixties, Warner has since popped up in various cult films from Straw Dogs to Titanic, a shadow of his youthful self. He's still only 60, and as Karl Johnson he is eminently watchable, even when ludicrously wielding an African spear collected on his travels. But his reactionary, entrepreneurial character does not suit his complex stage personality.
He is supposed to be dining in tandem with a bunch of epicureans in Paris, consuming snails with particular wines, surrounded by antique furniture and modern paintings. He allows Philip Glenister's bedraggled schoolmaster to join him for no other reason than that he turns up.
In Ron Daniels's stilted production, the rain outside is plainly dispensed by naff sprinklers, and bursts of Wagner punctuate thunder and lightning as in a bad thriller. Actually, I would have preferred a bad thriller.
Original article can be found here.
