The Human Body – Reviews Round-up

"Keeley Hawes blazes with emotion"

"What do you get if you cross Brief Encounter with the story of the NHS coming into being? Lucy Kirkwood’s potent new drama"

"Lucy Kirkwood’s potent new drama set in the austerity era, that perpetually fascinating period in which the blood and bravery of war is gone, to be replaced by the long grind of a country counting the cost, in every possible sense."

"Hawes has a singularly 40s face which, like Celia Johnson’s in Brief Encounter, can convey broiling depths of emotion behind an outwardly calm exterior. She blazes quietly throughout an occasionally unwieldy evening, one which is not devoid of some uncannily prescient predictions about the long-term future of the health service."

"Jack Davenport has been too long lost to these shores as his work takes him to the US, and the insouciant suavity of his performance reminds us of what we have been missing."

"It’s a knowing role reversal from Brief Encounter to make the woman the doctor here, but that renders it no easier to navigate between desire and duty."

"Keeley Hawes is luminous on her return to the stage"

"The leads are superb in this story about the early days of the NHS but the unfocused play is in need of some medical attention"

"Keeley Hawes makes an impressive return to live theatre in Lucy Kirkwood’s muddled drama set in 1948, which splices the creation of the NHS together with a black-and-white British postwar film romance."

"And she has a worthy foil in Jack Davenport, playing a wittily jaded movie star. Though I kind of loved the play’s mix of stridency and scattiness, and the way it juxtaposes theatrical and cinematic action, it’s overstuffed, overlong and unfocused."

"Kirkwood supplies them with spry banter and keeps Iris’s speeches just the right side of preachy. Goodman-Hill, Siobhán Redmond and Pearl Mackie augment the central performances with cameos that range from the deft to the demented."

"... ultimately it gets lost between conflicting demands: to celebrate feminist pioneers and heroic medics; to coo over postwar British cinema; and to interrogate the myth of national unity in wartime."

"Postwar Britain and the birth of the NHS on stage"

"Lucy Kirkwood’s ambitious play views history through the filter of romantic fiction"

"Midway through her new drama The Human Body, playwright Lucy Kirkwood impishly introduces the kind of play she didn’t write. Her heroine, Dr Iris Elcock (exquisitely played by Keeley Hawes), a GP and would-be MP, attends the theatre to watch an earnest political play — a pitfall that The Human Body could easily have fallen into but, being a better and more interesting piece, slinkily avoids. The result is gorgeously acted and restlessly intelligent, if somewhat overworked."

"There’s a giddy quality to the production, expressive of falling in love but also of the swirling uncertainties of the postwar period. And central to it all is the human body: fragile, battered by war, damaged by illness, gripped by desire."

"It’s a rich, deep, ambitious piece of theatre, constantly engaging and buzzing with ideas. But like Iris, it has a few too many things heaped on to its plate and suffers as a result."

"Keeley Hawes and the NHS in a silver-screen romance"

"Hawes and Jack Davenport radiate as postwar lovers in Lucy Kirkwood’s cinephile postwar romantic drama set against the birth of the NHS"

"As debate on the future of the National Health Service rises in urgency week by week (notwithstanding the current junior doctors’ strike), theatre is doing the job of reminding us of all we stand to lose by going back to its beginnings."

"Hawes and Davenport have a potentially explosive chemistry from the moment they meet in a train carriage, while Kirkwood’s script crackles with unspoken desires, disappointments, yearning and some fantastic humour."

"There is a similar use of film and screen techniques to Jamie Lloyd’s recent Sunset Boulevard and The Picture of Dorian Gray, currently starring Sarah Snook. The effect here, under the direction of Michael Longhurst and Ann Yee, takes away from the intensity, and earnestness, of the central love story rather than adding to it."

"The play perhaps has too many moving parts – thematically, in its plot turns, and in the literal motion on stage."

"Keeley Hawes and Jack Davenport have a glimmering brief encounter"

"The Human Body offers a captivating, messy New Look. Postwar Britain seen through a female lens. "

"Glimmering performances by Jack Davenport and Keeley Hawes focus the all-over-the-place charm of Michael Longhurst and Ann Yee’s production"

"Ideas about the difference between stage and cinema, love and romance, float without quite landing. This is an evening that, despite its firm advocacy of the NHS, rarely feels urgent. What delights is the carefully worked detail"

"Keeley Hawes dazzles in brimming drama about birth of the NHS"

"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"

"Does the Chimerica playwright’s latest live up to those three pieces, which showed a writer at the top of her game? Sort of. The Human Body doesn’t quite strike the heart or mess with the head in the same way, but the problem isn’t necessarily the play itself. It’s more that it’s bogged down by an overstuffed production."

"On its own terms, it’s a fabulously rich piece of writing that flings itself between two worlds. Partly it’s a pot-banging political play about the founding of the dear old NHS set in the real world where there’s suffering and politics and prolapses, and partly a dreamy drama about a Hollywood romance set to a stirring Brief Encounter-style piano score."

"Returning to the stage after more than a decade, Hawes dazzles."

"Yes, there’s some point here about artifice and fiction and escapism, and how the world of movies is fake and isn’t much like the real world. It’s just a bit too much. Longhurst and Yee seem determined to keep us aware of how the sausage is being made, when really you just want the beautiful, gripping, stirring, swooning…er, sausage."

"Keeley Hawes and Jack Davenport charm in this homage to the early NHS and the film ‘Brief Encounter’"

"Although there is a fair amount of scene-setting for the NHS side of the story, once George shows up it’s difficult to exaggerate the extent to which the first half of ‘The Human Body’ feels like a stage remake of ‘Brief Encounter’."

"The homage drops off in the second half: the silver screen stuff is Iris’s fantasy of escape, and the play becomes more about the pragmatic reality of a woman in ’40s Britain trying to enact meaningful change on the world."

"Hawes is terrific as a woman who has given everything she has in the name of her country, her patients and her family and is shocked to discover that she still somehow has her own needs. And Davenport is terrifically fun as a man so mired in his own cynicism that he’s shocked to discover how moved he is by Iris’s belief in something better. Both actors are playing to type; but they’re the right types. It’s star casting that pays off."

"‘The Human Body’ is a heartfelt but old-fashioned drama that gets hung up trying to find an original theatrical language."

"Finely judged performances from Hawes and Davenport"

"Keeley Hawes and Jack Davenport are poignant as midlife lovers in Lucy Kirkwood’s 1940s NHS drama"

"... this disjointed work from Lucy Kirkwood, a hybrid of 1940s period drama, on-the-nose political topicality and vintage cinematic melodrama-style romance. It has its author’s characteristic intelligence and wit, the dialogue crammed with texture and vivacity. And the production, co-directed by Michael Longhurst and Ann Yee, is beautifully acted, with finely judged lead performances from Keeley Hawes and Jack Davenport. But the stitches that hold its disparate parts together are fatally strained."

"Kirkwood raises some interesting notions about different types of heroism and the relationship between the corporeal and the body politic. But the hectic production often interferes with the flow of character and events, with people and places scarcely established before we’ve moved on. More engaging than the ideas here is the delicate drawing of the tentative midlife love affair"

"Keeley Hawes is terrific in this worthy fusion of NHS homage and Brief Encounter"

"Hawes and Jack Davenport impress in Lucy Kirkwood’s committed but convoluted drama of ideas and passion"

"Whatever vitamin supplements or other treatments Jack Davenport and Keeley Hawes are taking, can they share the details because they’re looking radiant."

"Their unfurrowed appearance is even more impressive given that they’re having subtly to strain nerve and sinew to win us over to a play by Lucy Kirkwood... Something to counter motion sickness might help too: this overlong swansong production by Donmar artistic director Michael Longhurst (with Ann Yee) uses the revolve like a Les Mis tribute night."

"In fact, Kirkwood’s drama of ideas and passions is valid – rewinding to post-war austerity Britain to depict hard-won new beginnings on the home front and the political sphere. Still, The Human Body hardly sets the heart a-flutter and, oddly enough, the superior title (in all ways) that the evening knowingly calls to mind – to the point of using live cameras to conjure black-and-white cinematics, complete with stirring strings – is Brief Encounter."

"There’s no faulting the leads: Hawes brims with admirable decency and pained yearning in a bright-eyed Celia Johnson-esque fashion, while Davenport is armed with watchful charm and a seductive bedside manner."

"Keeley Hawes can’t save dreary offering"

"Fans of Keeley Hawes will no doubt leap at the chance to see her at close quarters, but there’s no other reason to bother with this surprisingly limp period piece from Lucy Kirkwood"

"Kirkwood’s new drama, set at the dawn of the NHS, stumbles from one under-nourished scene to another, a posse of stage hands constantly rushing in with props."

"Kirkwood seems unsure of what kind of play she is trying to write. Is it a staid, semi-documentary celebration of the founding ideals of the NHS? Or is it a clever-clever meta-romance full of sly parallels with the thwarted emotions of Brief Encounter? It fails on both counts."