GEOFF BOTTOMS relishes a profoundly human portrait of a family as it evolves across 55 years in Sheffield
Downstate, National Theatre, London
Set in a group home for sex offenders in Illinois, Bruce Norris's play pulls no punches
Punishing experience: Downstate
[Michael Brosilow]
PAUL DONOVAN applauds an excellently crafted new musical that explores the life and death of Ruth Ellis
PAUL DONOVAN is tickled by the excruciating take-downs of one of the funniest, wittiest, political writers around.
RON JACOBS points out, via a transcription of Kissinger’s secret recordings, that Trump could never have existed without Nixon and Kissinger
ELLIS RAE is persuaded that the advantages of the ‘talking cure’ are superior to the treatment of mental illness with drugs
JOHN GREEN, MICHAL BONCZA and BELLA KATZ review The Good Boy, Broken English, and Don't Be Prey
DOWNSTATE is deeply uncomfortable viewing at times and it is all the better for it.
Two real-time extended scenes exclusively occupy the playing time — with the action framed in Todd Rosenthal’s meticulous, ultra-realist institutional setting — and, barely two minutes in, Andy is describing to his childhood abuser Fred how he used to fantasise about killing him by shoving the barrel of a gun down his throat.
The sanguine Fred, played with passive sensitivity throughout by Francis Guinan, seems oddly unmoved as he defies expectation to match Andy’s rage with an outpouring of repentance.
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