Reviews : THE REVENGER'S TRAGEDY
'The thing about Jacobean revenge drama, with all its violence, heightened emotion and sensational events, is that you either have to strap yourself in and be prepared to go along for the ride or it's all likely to be too much, too overwhelming, too absurd. It's much like going to the cinema to see a Tarantino movie, you might say.
Thus, Jonathan Moore's full-blooded and relentless but witty and elegant production of THE REVENGER'S TRAGEDY is almost certainly going to split and challenge audiences.
One thing's for sure, though and that is that audiences who've come to see Stephen Tompkinson reprise the sort of gentle TV roles which have made him a star, such as in Ballykissangel and Wild At Heart, are in for a hell of a shock.
Tompkinson BRILLIANTLY treads the line between TERRIFYING and FUNNY as Vindice...
Vindice's long-planned vengeance, a mixture of nearly a decade's obsessive scheming with some startling improvisation is a bloody and all-encompassing dance of death, even with members of his own family.
Yet it's also, in this TERRIFIC production, TERRIFYINGLY FUNNY.
The use of music by Moore, a long-time associate of the Exchange as an actor, writer and director is especially inspired. You'll never, I suspect, listen to Julie Andrews or The Sun Has Got His Hat On in quite the same way again!
The modern comparisons for this society out of control, where base appetites hold sway over decency, are clearly drawn but not laboured, while it's also clear that the production, for all its ferocity, has valuable things to say about grief and the values of family love and loyalty. It's bloody good in fact.'
Manchester Evening News
Murder with a dash of humour sweetens an old tale of revenge * * * *
I wonder if Stephen Tompkinson recognises THE REVENGER'S TRAGEDY from his old A-level notes preserved by his dad? In director Jonathan Moore's somewhat eccentric approach to the drama - indulging his fascination with a mishmash of eclectic musical and cultural allusions, applying a WICKEDLY FUNNY gloss to a contemporary slant - there's a BRILLIANTLY anarchic undercurrent that will surely win this play new admirers, not least from those for whom it is a set text.
If the National's production of the play, now assumed to be by Thomas Middleton, is anything like as compelling as that of Manchester Royal Exchange then theatregoers north and south of the Watford Gap will be in luck.
What reads like a complicated charade of confused indentities and skewed communications, interrupted by often oblique asides, isn't easy to bring to the stage....Where Moore is most successful, apart from drawing some sharply nuanced portrayals from a uniformly creative cast, is in tapping Tompkinson's vein of apparent melancholy, his quixotic expressions and his mercurial characteristics.
Starring as the anti-hero Vindice, he carries off the several parts his character adopts with an engaging verve and, no doubt increasingly as the production settles, a reckless velocity. One of the funniest moments is when Vindice, in one disguise, is called upon to kill himself in another guise. The subsequent vaudevillian hoofing to the accompaniment of The Sun Has Got Its Hat On is DELIGHTFULLY FUNNY and nimbly accomplished...
To the extremes of the virtue and vice explored in THE REVENGER'S TRAGEDY is added a vileness in characterisation, notably Robert Demeger's horribly suave duke, Jonathan Keeble's stentorian, sleazy Lussorioso and Eileen O'Brien's morally dubious Gratiana. Apart from an amusing shower scene, the action is remarkably stark in setting, confined mainly to the mosaicked floor of a plazzo whose crumbling foundations, strewn with old bones, reveal past grim deeds. The balance in tragicomedy is crucial but when so nearly perfectly acheived, in a production that rarely relaxes its grip, revenge has seldom been sweeter.'
The Independent