We round up the reviews for the world premiere of Lucy Kirkwood’s play.
WhatsOnStage: **** “The performances are a joy. Davenport is wonderfully urbane and just a little sad, entirely convincing as a man who has relied on charm to shield him from the intrusive troubles of life. And Hawes is superb, inhabiting Iris with a little jut of a defiant chin, capturing both her desire to make the world a better place and her increasingly bothered sense that her own life is built on a series of compromises. It’s a subtle wonder at the centre of an engrossing play.”
The Stage: *** “Keeley Hawes and Jack Davenport are poignant as midlife lovers in Lucy Kirkwood’s 1940s NHS drama.”
The Independent: *** “Hollywood and hopes for a new national health service collide in Lucy Kirkwood’s ambitious new play, but a near-faultless Hawes and wonderfully debonair Jack Davenport must sometimes battle an overstuffed production.”
The Guardian: *** “Hawes and Davenport are still phenomenal to watch, capturing the surprised headiness of mid-life lovers, while others in the cast (including Siobhán Redmond, Pearl Mackie and Flora Jacoby Richardson, who plays Iris’s daughter on opening night) turn actorly cartwheels, playing multiple characters.”
Evening Standard: **** “Kirkwood reminds us how bad things were for the British working class before the welfare state: and that doctors and Churchill’s Tories initially voted against an NHS. Hers is one of several plays appearing this year that presumably began life in the crucible of the pandemic. It’s therefore full of foreshadowing and bathos.”
The Telegraph: *** “Hawes and Jack Davenport impress in Lucy Kirkwood’s committed but convoluted drama of ideas and passion.”
London Theatre.co.uk: *** “It’s ambitious, intelligent and frequently funny work, but really feels like several plays in one – as well as part of a film. But it’s worth catching for the magnetic pair of Hawes and Davenport, and for the thoughtful reflections on whether the NHS is failing, or whether we’ve failed the great idea of the NHS.”
Time Out: *** “The Human Body’ is a heartfelt but old-fashioned drama that gets hung up trying to find an original theatrical language. It dreams of being something more than it is. But what it is, is still pretty damn likeable.”
The Arts Desk: **** “Hawes is a treat to watch, a wholly natural actress, even with a camera right in her face, who can suggest all the emotions bubbling under the surface of her motionless exterior – a typical late-1940s woman with hair ending in iron curls under a drab grey hat, feet in sensible grey shoes, body encased in an unflattering skirt-suit. Around George, she lights up, flirts and matches his acid wit with her own teasing humour. “
The Reviews Hub: **** “The Human Body is a celebration of the founding principles of the NHS and those who campaigned to make it happen, and while it finds great emotional impact in its central love story, the one thing the NHS has never been able to fix is a broken heart.”
Theatre Weekly: “Lucy Kirkwood’s script does wander off in odd directions sometimes, but The Human Body does manage to tell two different stories with great sensitivity, there are also some cracking comedic one-liners sprinkled throughout.”
Broadway World: **** “Though it’s a bit on the longer side, it’s uniformly engrossing and doesn’t feature any lulls or fillers. It’s a fascinating production from every viewpoint: Joshua Pharo’s in-your-face lighting, Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom’s video design, Ben and Max Ringham’s compositions, each aspect joins in harmony to deliver a compelling and thoroughly riveting product. Like most of what the Donmar has been producing lately, this is a show to see.”
Theatrecat.com: “Onstage cameras and high moody monochrome closeups overhead are used with unusual economy and taste , evoking the eternal tangle of politics and human emotion. I have rarely seen this fashionable stage technology done better. Kirkwood as ever has some lines too good to spoil in a review, but given today’s repellent political culture it is good to report how angry Siobhan Redmond’s minister is at Nye Bevan’s famous description of Tories as “lower than vermin”. She felt it alienated people from the fast-closing window of real change, because British people simply won’t tolerate rudeness.”
The Human Body continues to play at the Donmar Warehouse until the 13th April.