Though there is something cathartic about watching someone articulate a righteous anger... Beat the Devil comes across as somewhat slapdash, with a lumbering heavy-handedness that feels more akin to a first draft...'
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This is David Hare at his furious best... Whether you agree with his diagnosis or not, the piece grips in its light-touch incisiveness.'
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Ralph Fiennes channels David Hare's sickened fury in 'raw, urgent' lockdown play... The piece has such immediacy, and Fiennes such understated charisma, that any fear of Covid-fatigue is overcome.'
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...magnificently realised by Fiennes, who under Nicholas Hytner's quietly efficient and detailed direction, uses all his own sensitivity and charisma to create a portrait of a man undone by an illness...'
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...the playwright wants to deliver a lecture too, which means that the personal memoir — laced with mordant humour and impeccably performed by Ralph Fiennes — is frequently shoved aside...'
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Fiennes...magically animates the stage, though he barely moves on it...An initial poetry in the language is lost to a flatter, more muscular polemic... It is the script’s comic ire that provides the high notes.'
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Ralph Fiennes narrates with effortless charisma...But for all the play’s damning enumeration of our government’s well-documented failings, Hare never hits the full, indignant stride of his polemical best.'
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Hare’s writing vibrates with rage. It’s also grippingly vivid, crackling with gallows humour, and illuminated by tenderness... This is focused, furious theatre; it leaves you deeply angry, but energised.'
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