Maxine Peake in
On the Third Day
|
Kate Betts’ On the Third Day, the winner of the Channel 4 series The Play’s the Thing, opened at the West End’s New Ambassadors Theatre on 20 June. Maxine Peake, Paul Hilton and Tom McKay headline the show, which is directed by Robert Delamere. Did critics think the play (chosen from over 2,000 entries) is a gem?
Here’s a sampling of what they had to say:
Mark Shenton in his Theatre.com Review: “Betts’ play is nothing if not ambitious in its bold and frequent shifts of location and time—the action sweeps from such locations as the planetarium at Greenwich’s Royal Observatory to an underground cave that two characters abseil into—but it is also too densely layered and fractured to engage the heart as well as the mind… The disjointed play centers on the triangular relationships of Claire (Maxine Peake), a 30-year-old woman (prone to bouts of self-harming) and her 27-year-old brother Robbie (Tom McKay) that she has been estranged from for the last five years, and the man that reunites them who she met in a bar and may be the reincarnation of Jesus (Paul Hilton). All three actors bring an admirable conviction and commitment to these complex characters, and no budding playwright could hope to be better served than by the professional cast fielded here. Director Robert Delamere harnesses the play’s constantly shifting shapes and sizes into something organic even as it flies off in all sorts of directions at once that are also neatly evoked in Mark Thompson’s sleek, slick sets and Jon Driscoll’s atmospheric projections that stretch from sea to sky.”
Benedict Nightingale of The London Times: “One would have to be a blend of Scrooge, Rumpelstiltskin and Cruella de Vil not to wish this piece well. It’s that extreme rarity, a first play by a new dramatist in the commercial West End. And that’s because its author, Kate Betts, won a competition—set up by the producer Sonia Friedman and painstakingly chronicled on Channel Four—that brought 2,000-odd scripts by unknowns pouring into the Friedman letterbox, all with the prospect of a showing at the New Ambassadors… But as any publisher will tell you, slush piles seldom conceal masterpieces and, though Betts’s play is refreshingly bold and even original, it’s what she herself called it: a bit whimsical and raw. Sadly, it’s less than the sum of its ambitions, which are to deal with trauma, grief, incest and the confusions of an infinitely vast universe and the almost equally complex world in which a bloke calling himself Jesus may actually be an environmental health officer named Mike, but just may be that ontological EHO, Jesus.”
Michael Billington of The Guardian: "[The play] is a raw, wild, uneven piece that reveals a degree of theatrical imagination. Some of its virtues are negative ones: it is not another piece of bedsit angst or in-yer-face violence... Every writer, George Jean Nathan once claimed, has a bad Christ play in him, and there are times when Betts' play sails close to being another... Yet I was never bored, and Betts reveals a bold theatrical sense. The scenes in which Claire breaks down while working as a presenter at the Planetarium and where her brother takes Mike potholing in the Brecon Beacons have a Brentonesque strangeness... I just hope Betts survives the ballyhoo surrounding the TV series and gets the chance to hone her craft in decent obscurity. There is enough in her play to make me feel she has an odd, wayward talent."
Paul Taylor of The Independent: "Let's endeavour to block out that programme and the hoopla at last night's press night and imagine how one might react to the play if one didn't know that it was the last surviving guinea pig in this experiment. Then one can address the question of whether the experiment was well-conceived. I think that I would have wondered why such a talented cast and such excellent production values had been lavished on a drama of which I couldn't really believe a word, even while recognising the sincerity of the writing."
Nicholas de Jongh of The Evening Standard: "Practising masochists, interested in experiencing the oppressive boredom and angry bewilderment that a chronically inept piece of theatre can induce, should rush to savour Kate Betts' On the Third Day. They will have a satisfyingly bad time while they watch this ridiculous, religiously slanted contemporary melodrama—a sort of dramatising of a nervous breakdown or a nightmare, with a modern-day reincarnation of Jesus soothingly on hand... If On the Third Day was the best play the judges could discover then I conclude they were sent out of their distinguished minds through having to read too many plays, or that they looked for new playwrights in all the wrong places."