“This compact and captivating work about family dynamics darkened and deepened into my favorite play of the year“
New York Daily News Top Ten Plays List
Fiona Mountford
It’s a rare and precious equilibrium to find oneself in, as an audience member, intrigued by the dramatic scenario we’re watching unfold — but with absolutely no idea of what will happen next. Everything, wonderfully, is up for grabs, and elliptical American playwright Will Eno is determined to keep us guessing…he offers a wonderfully sharp skewering of dysfunctional family dynamics.
Tom Wicker
‘Greg Hicks shines as a tyrannical father in this audacious black comedy’
Eno’s writing cuts to the heart of family anxieties and baby boomers shackled to a previous generation’s money. His dialogue is like a series of razor slashes, opening gaping wounds. Hicks’s masterfully unpleasant Father is a curled, gnarled thing, twisted with embittered malice and spite.
Director Michael Boyd skilfully renders Eno’s picture of middle-class despair yoked desperately to a loveless formality as a painfully static portrait.
David Guest
‘The Open House is a monstrous dystopian vision of domestic…..If hell is other people, then Paradise begins with a kindly word’.
A dysfunctional family drama so incongruous it could be an episode of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone plays out in the suitably eccentric setting of the glorious Print Room at the Coronet, and will fill audiences with laughter or loathing.
Falling firmly under the banner of absurd theatre, Will Eno’s The Open House is one moment dripping with dark humour and pessimism, then half-way through a switch turns it into something astonishingly bright and optimistic.
Director Michael Boyd’s punctilious production, a collaboration with the Theatre Royal, Bath’s Ustinov Studio, couldn’t be cleaner in its attention to detail and in bringing together some terrific performances which lift it from asphyxiating negativity to a moral tale with ageless good-natured warmth.