Thursday, October 01, 2009

The Author at the Royal Court - Times Online:

Nowhere nice, as it turns out. Although even then, as the smiling, poetical Crouch muses on misdeeds from row E like some vicar of the avant-garde, the boundaries stay blurred. Are the metatheatrics just foliage? Or are they the message, a musing on the false divide between the real and the bogus, the safe and the perilous?

The uncertainty is what’s exciting here. And though there’s a lot of navel-gazing, it’s not the actors’ indulgence it sometimes appears to be amid 80 minutes that don’t always fly by. American sitcom themes play while you chat to your neighbour or look at the rest of the audience as if they were an artwork. A man confesses to a horrible misdeed. An actor storms out. Should we care? We’re in a crowd, yet left to our own devices. The Author is by turns funny, twee, exciting, unnerving and dull, and I don’t think I’ll ever forget it.