Categories Damian Lewis Five Gold Rings Print Media Reviews

Five Gold Rings at the Almeida – Review

Joanna Laurens’ “Five Gold Rings” has loftier things in mind than the mere settling of domestic scores

by Matt Wolf | January 4, 2004 | Variety

Not every dysfunctional family drama contains lines like, “It is art to fly speech in the air,” but Joanna Laurens’ Almeida Theater entry “Five Gold Rings” has loftier things in mind than the mere settling of domestic scores. In her sophomore play following her much-praised debut effort “The Three Birds” (which I missed), Laurens wants to reinvent the discourse in such plays, trading in a time-worn naturalism for a heightened language that less charitably inclined playgoers likely will find wearing.

That the evening possesses the considerable fascination it does honors both director Michael Attenborough, in his second consecutive play at this address as Almeida a.d. (following Neil LaBute’s “The Mercy Seat”), and a blue-chip cast of British theater veterans (David Calder) and ascending younger talents (Damian Lewis, Helen McCrory), all of whom are in top form. Sure, “Five Gold Rings” may sound at times as if it has been translated from Latin, but it’s unlikely to encounter more gifted interpreters.

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Categories Damian Lewis Five Gold Rings Print Media Reviews

Five Gold Rings at the Almeida – Review

Five Gold Rings

by Michael Billington | December 19, 2003 | The Guardian

I feel sorry for Joanna Laurens. Having been praised for the poetic inventiveness of her first play, The Three Birds, I suspect she will take a lot of flak for writing a non-naturalistic family drama. Yet, since we sanction all kinds of wild physical theatre, it seems only right that we should find room for linguistic experiment.

Laurens’s play sounds like a conventionally unhappy family reunion. Henry, a penniless patriarch living in a mysterious desert, is attended at Christmas by his two sons and their wives. But both marriages are in trouble; and when the supposedly impotent Daniel is attracted to his childless sister-in-law, Miranda, the skeletons come tumbling out of the family cupboard. Daniel’s plan to flee with Miranda is unwittingly financed by his brother, Simon, which leads to revelations of revenge, rape and incest.

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