A round-up of reviews of The Judas Kiss at Hampstead Theatre starring Rupert Everett and Freddie Fox.
With Michael Billington in the Guardian writing that Rupert Everett gives “the performance of his career” in David Hare’s play The Judas Kiss at Hampstead Theatre, it’s safe to say that Hampstead has yet another hit on its hands.
The Judas Kiss describes two pivotal moments in the downfall of playwright Oscar Wilde, directed by Australia’s leading theatre and opera director Neil Armfield.
The production stars Rupert Everett as Oscar Wilde and Freddie Fox as Bosie.
Read reviews of The Judas Kiss, below.
LINKS
Average rating score for this production 
REVIEWS ROUND-UP
"Australian director Neil Armfield gives us not so much a revival as a miraculous rehabilitation... Regardless of Everett’s husky restraint, and the striking immobility of his towering frame and aquiline features, The Judas Kiss still stands arrestingly disrobed before us, all the same, as a scintillating play of ideas whose power stealthily increases. ""Everett's Wilde is the big, fleshy, heavy-jowled figure we see in the later portraits and the Max Beerbohm cartoons. But there is deep pathos in the way his blubbery features crumple into tears when confronted by the generosity of hotel servants, and a rich vein of anger when, shunned by his friends and isolated from his children, he rails against society's demand for penance as well as punishment. "
"Everett, aged and dressed most convincingly, accesses emotions in a way I’ve never seen in him before. There’s a perpetually haunted, hunted look behind both the eyes and the aperçus, which only deepens when he’s forced to watch the frivolous Bosie cavorting with a Neapolitan fisherman. Fox, who has the look of a petulant cherub, intriguingly suggests a boy playing a man’s game, confident that a safety net of wealth and privilege will eventually catch him when he falls. Outstanding."
"The piece makes a deeper and more affecting impression now in Neil Armfield’s revival at Hampstead."
"Rupert Everett is an interesting and ultimately successful choice to play Oscar Wilde in this revival of David Hare’s 1998 imagining of the great Irish playwright and wit’s last years ... It is inevitably hard to disengage Wilde from the pose, but Everett finds in Hare’s words the pathos, anger and fearsome intelligence beneath his overwhelmingly tragic loyalty to love."
Date: 13 September 2012
Written by: WestEndTheatre
Tags: David Hare, Freddie Fox, Hampstead Theatre, Neil Armfield, Rupert Everett, The Judas Kiss