Cold War at the Almeida Theatre – Reviews

"One of the best plays of 2023"

"The theatre opened 2023 with one of the stage highlights of the year, A Streetcar Named Desire, and with this it ends the year in the very same way"

"Rupert Goold, director and magic-maker extraordinaire, has teamed up with playwright Conor McPherson, creator of the exquisite Girl from the North Country, for another superlatively resonant “play with songs”. These plangent songs, not to be outdone by all the other creative credentials flying about, are by none other than Elvis Costello."

"This small but mighty piece takes on, with unflagging sophistication, mighty themes – the sacrifices we make for others, the decisions we take that benefit only ourselves – and asks the towering existential question: what, or where, is freedom?"

"The venue produces hit after unstoppable hit – this is simply exquisite."

"Pawel Pawlikowski’s doomed love story, brilliantly translated to the stage"

"Mulled wine and festive cheer? Forget about it, and see this bleak postwar love story unfold instead"

"There’s cold weather, alcohol and fights, but that’s about as Christmassy as this exquisitely sad love story between two Poles adrift in postwar Europe gets. It’s been adapted sensitively by Conor McPherson from Pawel Pawlikowski’s award-winning 2018 film, the folk music of the original augmented with new and existing songs by Elvis Costello. But to call it a musical would somehow denigrate the atmospheric mournfulness of Rupert Goold’s production, strongly led by Anya Chalotra and Luke Thallon."

"Goold’s production is vividly designed, embracing bright peasant garb and left-bank boho chic, Iron Curtain apparatchik offices and smoky, spotlit clubs. Choreographer Ellen Kane gives us windmilling rural dances, a spiritedly drunken jive to Rock Around the Clock, and a take on the famous Madison routine from Jean-Luc Godard’s Band a part. I didn’t have any of this on my dance card for theatre in December, but Cold War is a brilliantly bitter antidote to standard Christmas fare."

"Anya Chalotra and Luke Thallon are magnificent in this swooning adaptation of the hit Polish indie film"

"As a semi-authentic Pole I joined some of my countryfolk in raising an eyebrow when the Almeida’s ‘Cold War’ was announced. That’s because it’s a rare example of a recent Polish story being told on an English stage – an adaptation of Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2018 indie flick – that is distinctly light on the involvement of Polish talent... With that said, I’m going to declare glasnost, because frankly ‘Cold War’ is beautiful."

"The core of the production is the extraordinary chemistry between Thallon’s gloriously arid Wiktor – he’s a bit like Hugh Grant on downers – and Chalotra’s force of nature Zula, her Black Country accent alive and crackling."

"Goold directs the whole thing like a sad, smokey late-night cabaret performance in a faded old bar: there’s a glamour to it but it’s intimate, warm and nocturnal. There are some clever tableaux and scene transitions with moments of clever stylisation but nothing too flashy – aesthetically it’s defined by the constant chugging of stage cigarettes."

"Ultimately it’s a radiantly sad story about two people whose love is not enough to cure the wounds they suffered before we even met them. As beautiful as only doomed romances could be, with lead performances to die for."

"Elvis Costello soundtracks a postwar Polish love story"

"Rupert Goold’s Almeida has seriousness and swagger. You smell those qualities even in the bar. And see them in the collaborators who have adapted Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2018 film for the stage."

"Elliot Levey’s fixer buzzes with terrible plausibility. Anya Chalotra is marvellous as a smudgy-eyed romantic: limp with unhappiness, barking with resentment, rapt when singing. Luke Thallon distils the period. A lesser actor would tremble and throw out winking hints at shiftiness. Thallon holds himself taut, as if semi-frozen; words escape him with difficulty. He is becoming more powerful and more elusive with each new role."

"More gold from Rupert Goold with this tender, tragic love story"

"With a translation by Conor McPherson, the Almeida's stage premiere of Paweł Pawlikowski’s bleak 2018 film Cold War is a triumph"

"Rupert Goold may not have been awarded the top job in British theatre this week, highly eligible though he is to run the NT, but by chance he provides further evidence of being at the top of his game with this stage premiere of Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2018 Polish-language film Cold War."

"With some saving wit, much of it channelled through the figure of Elliot Levey’s morally slimy Kaczmarek, he [Conor McPherson] denotes the cultural repression of the post-war Stalin era"

"Anya Chalotra achieved a breakthrough in the Netflix series The Witcher; here, she’s a bewitching revelation as Zula, her voice arresting in its yearning and force, her presence aglow with aloofness and pride"

"Cold War combines love, politics and art in a stirring drama"

"... Rupert Goold’s beautiful production of Cold War."

"They are superbly played by Luke Thallon and Anya Chalotra, who pull your sympathies back and forth, with spare, soulful songs from Costello speaking for them as they strive to survive in an impossible world."

"McPherson’s episodic script flits through the story skilfully, though a few scenes and characters — such as Irena, Wiktor’s previous partner, played by the excellent Alex Young — feel rather short-changed."

"The piece ends, as it begins, with music: a beautiful, haunting duet from Costello for Wiktor and Zula, movingly delivered by Thallon and Chalotra. Bleak but beautiful."

"A lush tender play with joy as well as trauma"

"... there is joy as well as trauma, cheering choreography as well as injurious intensity, in this bewitching adaptation. The script by Conor McPherson (The Weir, Girl from the North Country) stays close to the original and finds a truly theatrical, darkly witty character of its own. Elvis Costello adds artful scraps of songs, mostly from the mordantly romantic side of his output (I Want You included)."

"The storytelling always grips tightest, though. Luke Thallon, British theatre’s captain of underplaying, artfully sucks us into the undemonstrative orbit of the pianist Wiktor."

"There are other standout performances in a fine ensemble. Elliot Levey finds the fun in the hard-hustling promoter Kazmarek, yet retains his authority and humanity"

"It’s a play with music rather than a musical per se, especially in a second half that sidelines the songs. However you bracket it, its mixture of spectacle and scenes of notable emotional acuity make Cold War another triumph for its director, Rupert Goold."

"The Almeida is a tiny theatre in north London but more than any other venue it has the ability to transport you to different places. In Jon Bauser’s evocative design of brick arches and slab floors, and in Rupert Goold’s exceptional fluid direction, an entire world is conjured."

"A sense of time and place is vitally important to Conor McPherson’s clever adaptation of Pawel Pawlikowski’s Oscar-nominated film."

"Goold’s direction is extraordinarily sensitive and supple; scenes seem to morph into one another rather than simply arriving. The themes emerge in a similar way. The play sees music is both as an escape and a tool, always capable of being perverted by a regime that sees a reshaped tradition as a means of building a glorious future, but equally always a force for true expression."

"Elusive and sometimes frustrating"

"Piercingly beautiful but elusive melancholy love story, with gorgeous music from Elvis Costello"

"Conor McPherson’s stage version, directed by Rupert Goold, has a very different flavour. It is broader, more bleakly humorous, with a more expansive sense of the characters who surround the lovers."

"It is a languorous and episodic watch, as Luke Thallon’s Wiktor and Anya Chalotr’s Zula are caught up in a push-pull dance in which, from the start, they are fated to be perpetually out of step. Goold’s staging creates a penetrating mood of melancholy and yearning. Often piercingly beautiful, it is also elusive, and sometimes frustrating, its meditative tone lacking impetus, and the interplay of the political and personal so subtle that it never gains much traction."

"The overall effect is slow and cumulative, and for all its moments of stark loveliness, dramatically the play doesn’t satisfy. But it is like an emotional bruise, tenderly and insistently inflicted."

"Stylish staging of love in post-war Poland is strangely rootless"

"Elvis Costello’s tame songs and Rupert Goold’s detached, hip production make this stage adaptation of Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2018 film lack its original warmth and richness"

"Rupert Goold’s stylish Almeida staging of Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2018 film is full of abrasive chemistry and rough magic. But it still feels like a slightly bizarre, rootless enterprise, especially when you factor in its tame and very un-Polish score of songs (new and existing) by Elvis Costello."

"Costello’s tunes have a gentle melancholy that’s at odds with the raw, self-destructive agony of this story’s lovers – and that’s easily overpowered by the impassioned Polish songs they spend their careers singing."

"By detaching Cold War from its Polish setting, Goold creates something that’s stylish and intermittently moving – but lacking the fire that would make its love story blaze bright."

"Conor McPherson follows doomed love across eastern bloc"

"Luke Thallon and Anya Chalotra are the lovers in this adaptation of Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2018 film, with Polish folk music and Elvis Costello songs"

"he score never overwhelms the action (this is no musical), but nor does it quite invoke Zula’s passion for song. Pacing is also a problem for director Rupert Goold. Pawlikowski’s film concertinaed more than 20 years into an elliptical 88 minutes, so it is perhaps inevitable that the material, necessarily lugubrious in nature, feels unhappily protracted at times."

"Cast members stick pleasingly to their assorted British dialects, Death of Stalin-style"

"Chalotra, a dead ringer for Penélope Cruz in looks and volatility, explores fearlessly the depths of Zula’s pain. The bookishly handsome Thallon captures the haunted aspect of a man fleeing his own propensity for cruelty, and waging war on himself."