by RikMayallScrapbook | You Tube | February 10, 1995
Rik Mayall is a tramp called Raymond who finds his life changes radically when he gets his hands on a sought-after script. First broadcast on ITV on the 5th February 1995. Cast also include, Helen McCrory, Brian McCardie, Frances Barber and Michael Kitchen.
by Matt Wolf | September 12, 1994 | Variety
The National marks time pleasantly with a roisterous production of Shaw’s 1899 melodrama and at least restores to the Olivier stage some of the energy missing from it of late. If the play hardly seems worth such a fuss, it’s only because Shaw is relatively rarely done at this address; one yearns to see the same theater take on, say, “Man and Superman.”
Still, as directed with brio by Christopher Morahan against John Gunter’s scenic backdrop of a map of Revolutionary War New England, “Devil’s Disciple” will be a crowd pleaser. There’s no harm in that, particularly with as winning a central trio of performers as Richard Bonneville (Dick Dudgeon), Paul Jesson (Anthony Anderson) and Helen McCrory (his wife, Judith), all of whom barnstorm their way through a play that has not an ounce of depth or subtlety to it. The “devil’s disciple” of the title, Dudgeon is the family black sheep led mistakenly to the gallows in 1777 New Hampshire in place of the town pastor, Anderson.
Continue reading The Devil’s Disciple at the National Theatre – Review
By Irving Wardle | July 9 ,1994 | The independent
Besides allowing Dame Judi Dench to add another trophy to her collection of Chekhov leads, John Caird’s production of The Seagull has the pretext of restoring a picture frame to the open stage; or, rather, four picture frames, which descend one by one on John Gunter’s lakeside perspective, so that by the end you are looking through the accumulated settings of the whole play. The apparent aim of this romantically cumbersome design, supported by Dominic Muldowney’s wistful valses oubliees, is to break the embargo on Chekhovian ‘atmosphere’. The effect is contradicted once the opening image of the ghostly company drifting under moonlit birch trees gives way to the play itself, performed with full egoistic drive in a colloquially muscular version by Pam Gems.
Continue reading The Seagull at the National Theatre – Review
Continue reading The Seagull at the National Theatre – Review
By Sheridan Morley | February 24, 1993 | International Herald Tribune
“Trelawny of the ‘Wells’ ” is one of those scripts that everyone hates except the public, and the actors who get to play it. After a 30-year absence from London, Pinero’s epitaph for the old actor-laddies has turned up twice, just before Christmas in a patchy all-star West End revival sadly lacking much direction, and now in a vastly better John Caird production for the open Olivier stage of the National.
The mystery, though, is why he didn’t go for the musical; Caird at his best (“Les Misérables”)and his worst (“Children of Eden”) is a director who, like his old partner Trevor Nunn, knows a very great deal about how to give classical dignity to song-and-dance shows.
Continue reading Trelawny of the Wells at the National Theatre – Review