“The cast do their best with the material and the set is well executed, but when you’re forced to watch often selfish characters hash their issues out, you may get more entertainment out of watching your own family bicker for two hours.”
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“Its farce plot is unfussy and simple, resolving uber smooth and quickly, almost without a whimper. Cruel justice is its subject, as well as real love – we feel that cruelty at hand more keenly perhaps, with more zest than the love, throughout. But the love’s still there.”
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“Directors Richard Wilson and Terry Johnson do a good job of balancing humour and heart on what feels at times like a knife’s edge. If this production is guilty of anything, perhaps, it is mugging slightly too hard to the audience”
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“It’s a play that touches on ideas around ageing and alienation, care and family love, but focuses on making us laugh – and latterly, nudging a tear towards our eye – rather than developing them.”
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“This is a show that is not for everyone. Those that it is intended for, we are sure will enjoy it but as a community, there is always more that we can do in our choices to make a production and its aims accessible to everyone, while still keeping the original intent of the piece.”
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“It’s bound to strike a chord with anyone who has watched loved ones start to deteriorate, and it seems well-attuned to a Hampstead Theatre audience that may well understand the prevailing dynamic even if they are less familiar day-to-day with the Hull accent.”
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“Having just lost my mother, I found the elegiac portrait of imminent parental death and bereavement – and the sense of a generational way of life, ordinary yet inimitable, on the brink of erasure – all too poignant.”
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“The plot is vestigial, only there to support a series of running gags, acrimonious banter, shaggy dog stories and standalone jokes that feel even older than Jack. It’s entertaining enough, with moments of pathos, but feels sketchy and unfinished. The ending, which takes place during lockdown, descends into cliché.”
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