Good Canary
Playwright: Zach Helm Director: John Malkovich
Rose Theatre, Kingston (020-8174 0090) Until 8 October Running time: 2hrs 30mins (including interval)
The Rose has “pulled off quite a coup by bagging this edgy American import”, said Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail. A “raw, riveting” and often upsetting production, it marks the London directing debut of John Malkovich. It’s a play which the US film star has staged twice before, in France and Mexico, said Henry Hitchings in the London Evening Standard. And you can see why: it’s a “scorching portrait of mental illness” and addiction which is “at times distressing but also funny”, and which ultimately proves emotionally devastating.
At the heart of the play is selfdestructive Annie, the fiercely intelligent but evidently sick wife of a suddenly successful young novelist, Jack. “She’s a nightmare,” said Susannah Clapp in The Observer, “and she is in the right.” Her days she spends ferociously cleaning the house while high on speed; unleashed at a literary party, she glugs a bottle of vodka and “eviscerates” a critic rash enough to praise her husband’s book. And Freya Mavor is astonishing in the part. Her “dervish” of a performance – gangling, cartwheeling, poignant and droll – is alone worth the trip to Kingston. And she is balanced “very finely” by rising star Harry Lloyd in the less spectacular role of the husband. This bracing evening makes “much of London theatre look slow-witted and slow-eyed”.
Although “clever and adroit”, I admired this “more for its dazzling staging than for what it actually says”, said Michael Billington in The Guardian. Pierre-françois Limbosch’s designs are a “thing of beauty: they use projections of New York streets and cafés with painterly precision”. But the play itself never transcends its rather sentimental conclusion. Still, the acting is top-notch, said Sarah Crompton on Whatsonstage. com. Steve John Shepherd is “terrific” as a small-time publisher. So are Ilan Goodman as a neurotic drug dealer and Simon Wilson as a “preening but passionate” critic, said Theo Bosanquet in Time Out. Clearly, the actors have responded well to Malkovich’s famously “full-throttle approach to the craft”.