Andrzej Lukowski — Theater Critic

I’d like to see a bit more daring than a tweak to the acting next time this play is revived. This is the third ‘Long Day’s Journey’ to hit the West End in 12 years, and none have exactly been formally wild. There’s some nifty sound design here from Tom Gibbons – sepulchral fog horns, and subtler ambient sounds – but mostly this is a very straight production.

There are no dance numbers, power ballads, lavish sets, or cute romantic storylines. By entering the West End, ‘Opening Night’ is almost inevitably inviting an audience that will be confused by it. And yet: there’s a palpable warmth to it. Maybe it’s a musical, maybe it isn’t, but under all the avant-garde bells and whistles, it unquestionably has a heart – a buoyancy and belief in humanity that’s lacking in the original film.

The performances are uniformly tremendous, notably Lovibond’s quicksilver Ruby and Best’s pained, angry Gloria. There is first-rate accent work: enormous respect to dialect coach Danièle Lydon for thoroughly indoctrinating her largely non-Lancastrian cast. And there’s stunning work from designer Rob Howell: the main set is simply the living room of the guesthouse, but there is something profoundly haunting about the towering, almost Escher-like set of stairs that erupts from it, a conduit from the humdrum downstairs to the unseen realm of death that hovers in the wings.

Sure, it’s notionally aimed at families. But the National Theatre’s Roald Dahl adaptation ‘The Witches’ really is for everyone, (everyone over eight anyway). Because it’s quite easily the funniest new musical London has seen since at least ‘The Book of Mormon’.

I know it’s rude to draw attention to a person’s age, but the fact Ian McKellen has racked up five major stage performances in the four years since he turned 80 – ‘Hamlet’, ‘The Cherry Orchard’, ‘Hamlet’ (again), ‘Mother Goose’ and now ‘Frank and Percy’ – is nothing short of astonishing. The erstwhile Gandalf is the David Attenborough of the theatre world, seemingly exempt from the usual rules of ageing. And despite the fact that he seems most comfortable working with his regular director Sean Mathias, there’s something mightily impressive about his willingness to put his vast cultural capital to use in a new play.

To his credit, Van Hove never makes it feel pulpy or trashily exploitative, more of a meditative treatise on how life is unutterably cruel and shit. But in doing so it becomes a sort of experiment in terror, an attempt to see how an audience will react to seeing unimaginable horrors piled upon a single character with almost nothing in the way of relief. There’s some seating at the back of the stage and I wonder if its main purpose is so we can see the shocked faces of our fellow audience members' faces.

Coleman is cold and brittle as lawyer Bernadette, who is insecure and irritated that her musician boyfriend takes a dim view of her profession and seeks out the company of his more political friends, including his ex. And Olivier – while admirably socially engaged – is just a bit of a self-absorbed prick. We never really get to enjoy their relationship at any point: it’s always tense. Not that the play is one note, and it’s fascinating how the pair change after the hush law is enforced: before they probably yakked away too much, endlessly dancing around their actual feelings; after they’re stressed and miserable, unhappy with their brutally limited means of expressing themselves.

Moffat is an accomplished TV writer, and while not best known for comedy these days, he did mastermind enjoyable early ’00s sitcom ‘Coupling’. But clearly most playwrights don’t go straight into the West End with their first play. ‘The Unfriend’ is relatively short, but also waffly, unfocused and above all, bland. It’s easy to fantasise about what a playwright specialising in dark comedy like Richard Bean might have got out of the premise. But it’s doubly frustrating that as writers, both Gatiss and Shearsmith have such good form for the domestic grotesque; after a while, the cheeky little detail of Peter and Debbie’s house being number nine feels like it’s taunting us.

If Hellman’s message about the foolishness of American isolationism – both politically and practically – feels perennially relevant, then there’s no denying ‘Watch on the Rhine’ was written for a specific time. It must have been incendiary in its day. It’s not now. But its shift from bourgeoise cosiness to shocking violence remains bravura stuff.