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Annons
Seriously, though, people hate this play. Twitter is mad about it, all the blogs are mad, someone wrote an open letter on the NT’s Facebook, begging them to pull the show before press night for the “sake of” the National Theatre itself. Well, press night was last night and it just sounded like so much fun that I had to go along. Would it be, as some on the net had suggested, “the worst play I have ever seen”? Would I die of disappointment when the main character was “about as macho as a pile of custard”? Would I rather “bite off my own thumb and choke on it 'til my lungs exploded through my nostrils”??Long story short: no. It is bad, but it's not that bad. However, legend of its badness had, by this point, reached such a height that the audience had a real “all in this together” vibe, as though we were about to go through some kind of theatrical blitzkrieg and had to keep calm, carry on and eat overpriced wasabi peas to present a united front. It seemed to me like panic edits had happened, because the play was very short – barely two hours instead of the two hours and 35 minutes it began as this week – and reviews from the preview describe all kinds of hilarious pyrotechnics and ludicrously complex choreography that seem to have been axed from the production that I saw. There was still a needless slow-motion shoot out and a truly INSANE ascension-into-heaven scene, though, so not all is lost.
Annons
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