Review Roundup: Kim Cattrall-Led SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH

Kim Cattrall stars alongside acclaimed Broadway actor Seth Numrich in Tennessee Williams' powerful and poetic play, Sweet Bird of Youth, directed by Olivier Award-winner Marianne Elliott.

Fading Hollywood legend Alexandra Del Lago (Cattrall) flees the disastrous premiere of her comeback film. Travelling incognito, she seeks refuge in drink, drugs and the arms of Chance Wayne (Numrich), an idealistic young dreamer turned gigolo. A trip to Chance's hometown in a bid to win back his childhood sweetheart sees their relationship of convenience unravel in Tennessee Williams' vivid and haunting portrait of the destruction of dreams.

Let's see what the critics had to say...

Michael Billington, The Guardian: The best part of the play is the early bedroom scene between the zonked out Del Lago and the self-seeking Chance. It is an encounter that gives the excellent Cattrall an opportunity to show the movie star's multiple contradictions. Cattrall displays a fear of solitude, a whim of iron, a hunger for the consolation of sex and an acidic wit. Informed by Chance that he was always the best-looking guy in town, she crisply asks "How large is this town?"

Paul Taylor, Independent: The unbearably loud television transmission of the demagogic racist rally offstage, the lurid lightning flashes it seems to trigger and the brutal centre-stage beating up of the heckler: all this brings home both the chilling political reality and at the same time filters it through the tormented subjectivity of the man whose tragic self-disgust, essential isolation and suicidal passivity Numrich so affectingly and stealthily delineates. Strongly recommended.

Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph: Yet wonderfully even at her lowest ebb Catrall also suggests the grandiosity of a Hollywood star and her put downs of her devious lover are superbly assured and witty. There is equally fine work from the hunky American work Seth Numrich as a super-annuated toyboy, deviously plotting to make use of Cattrall while actually heading towards disaster as he belatedly learns what happened to the one girl he ever loved.

Quentin Letts, Daily Mail: This is a play of histrionics, dissolute people leading desperate lives. Marianne Elliott's staging is strikingly extravagant. The sets and lighting are tops. As is usual at the Old Vic, the whole thing is showy, slick, but less profound than it thinks it is. Not a short evening, either.

Michael Coveney, Whatsonstage: It's a back-handed compliment, really, but Kim Cattrall errs on the side of complexity and good taste in playing one of Tennessee Williams' scariest sacred monsters, Alexandra Del Lago, travelling incognito along the Gulf Coast with a small-town gigolo, Chance Wayne. Well, not all that "incognito": she's billed as the Princess Kosmonopolis, and she's reeling from a comeback failure on the big screen like some insatiate amalgam of Tallulah Bankhead and Norma Desmond.

Henry Hitchings, Evening Standard: Kim Cattrall brings languid allure and a finely judged air of irrationality to her role as a fading film star in this revival of Tennessee Williams's 1959 play. But it's Seth Numrich opposite her who is the revelation - a graduate of the American production of War Horse, this Minnesota native offers a lovely mix of poise and fragility.

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