Theatre: The Red Barn

National Theatre, London SE1 (020-7452 3000). Until 17 January Running time: 1hr 50mins ★★★

David Hare’s new play at the National Theatre is the product of a “remarkable rescue operation”, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. Having burrowed through “the avalanche of novels” left by the prolific Belgian writer Georges Simenon, he has unearthed a neglected volume, La Main, and “turned it into a gripping interval-free two hours of theatre” – ably assisted by the “whizz-kid” director Robert Icke, who makes a “sensational” NT debut. As the play opens, we suspect we are in for a “classic murder mystery”, said Sarah Hemming in the FT. Two couples stagger back from a party through a blizzard to an isolated house in Connecticut; one of the four doesn’t make it. But as the piece develops, we get something “much slower, colder and subtler” than the set-up suggests: this is a “creeping psychological chiller about the banality of evil, about masculinity, misogyny and 1960s America”.

Icke’s production won’t please everyone, said Andrzej Lukowski in Time Out. Some may find its glacial pace “unbearable”. But if you can “surrender to its crepuscular ebb and flow and wincing interrogation of masculinity then it will thrill”. In a notably “starry production”, Mark Strong gives a “quietly devastating” performance as Donald Dodd, a man who until now has (he says) “lived his whole life with the handbrake on”. Hope Davis is understatedly brilliant as his chilly wife, Ingrid. And Elizabeth Debicki (of The Night Manager) is great as the alluring wife of their missing friend.

The winter storm is “powerfully realised, loud and genuinely threatening”, said Christopher Hart in The Sunday Times. Indeed, Bunny Christie’s design is “impeccable throughout”. In a nod to Hitchcock, there are sliding black screens creating apertures through which we view the action – the eerie effect is of “a contracting pupil or camera lens closing in”. There’s the problem, said Michael Billington in The Guardian: over the course of 22 scenes, the “cinematic technique becomes repetitive and one begins to feel one is watching a slowly decelerating film noir”. And it’s not at all clear why we are watching such a “filmic” piece in a theatre.