Harold Pinter Theatre

An amazing show, we haven’t seen the original film so we weren’t comparing it to that. The costumes and look are of a western but the themes are current, the battle for right and wrong/good and evil, who stands up for what, gun violence, the brave and the less so when the chips are down. The dancing and music created, at times, a light touch in a hard watch (themes, it was gripping to watch). I left feeling there was so much in it that I want more time to think through it. It was just great. Thank you to all involved.

A classic story brought into the 21st century without taking anything away from the original masterpiece.

This show is packed with excellence. Uniformly strong performances and a thoughtful, tense script that makes the most of resonances with current-day American politics have turned a great movie into a terrific piece of theatre. The ever-present station clock stands centrally, high above the action, beating down on the stage like the noon sun and inexorably ticking down in (almost) real time to the moment of Kane's seismic confrontation with Miller, while superb lighting and stage effects join in to create the suffocatingly dry dusty heat of New Mexico. This is a parable about the cost of doing the right thing, and without giving any spoilers, it sidesteps the all-too-neatly packaged ending of the 1952 movie and replaces it with an ambivalent denouement that is a million miles away from neat. Some of the choices of music were a little odd, anachronistic, or even jarring, but did not detract from the whole show. My only advice would be to go and see this now.