Man and Boy reviews round-up at the National Theatre starring Ben Daniels

"An extraordinary performance from Ben Daniels powers this gloriously unhinged take on Terence Rattigan’s finance drama"

"... this is a truly extraordinary revival, that in its way has a significance that transcends the actual choice of play."

"Anthony Lau’s production is the first Rattigan I’ve seen that throws off the shackles of naturalism."

"Staged in the round, designer Georgia Lowe‘s distinctly Brechtian, wilfully anachronistic set... sets Rattigan free from chintzy tradition, and when combined with Angus MacRae’s wild, jazzy score gives the whole thing a sense of danger, unpredictability and transcendence of a specific time and place."

"It also liberates star Ben Daniels from period constraints, freeing him up to deliver what is easily the best stage performance of the year to date."

"... he’s seethingly dangerous, his shark-like charm punctuated by flashes of bottomless rage and an unsettling, insectoid physicality as he prowls and scuttles over the tables... He is frightening and unpredictable, a sort of nightmare amalgam of JP Morgan and Joseph Goebbels"

"... whether or not the source material is flawed, this is an extraordinary couple of hours of theatre, the performance of the year wrapped up in a wild production that tears up everything we thought we knew about how to stage good old Terence Rattigan."

"It’s rarely performed even now.... But seen in Antony Lau’s fast-paced, urgent revival, Man and Boy emerges as a surprisingly hard-edged play, upsetting in its subject matter and fierce in its execution."

"With the peerless Ben Daniels outstanding as Antonescu, it has a savagery and sharpness that make it utterly compelling."

"Lau dispenses with its comfy realism and lets it play out on a green baize-covered square"

"Aspects of Georgia Lowe’s design are gimmicky – the “Knock, Knock” flashing above the assumed doorway, for example. Others are exhausting: the characters are constantly jumping up onto a table."

"Daniels is magnificent."

"Man and Boy may not be Rattigan at his humane best, but this stringent revival makes it clear how much more loudly he still speaks than many playwrights who succeeded him."

"Rattigan’s Man and Boy feels eerily relevant after the Epstein scandal"

"Power, money and sexual leverage drive the revival at the National, but it strains too hard to jazz things up experimentally"

"Terence Rattigan’s laboured but intriguing Thirties-set drama from 1963"

"While the two lead performances in Anthony Lau’s revival at the National compel, its glaring deficit is that it strains too hard to jazz things up experimentally."

"All this sets it apart from traditional stagings. But is it doing any favours to Rattigan himself? Daniels’s self-aggrandising poses impress and may even distress.... But with Rattigan there is always ample going on under the surface, and you feel that he was striving for an air of Pinteresque menace"

"That nuance is best expressed by Kynaston’s anguished son"

"With precise posture and rasping intonation, Daniels commands attention"

"My advice: ditching those tables would reap greater theatrical dividends."

"Rattigan revival has a great, grandstanding lead performance"

"Terence Rattigan’s drama about a monstrous New York financier sees some big performances take over the National Theatre"

"Ben Daniels commands the limelight, steals every scene and would chew the scenery if there were any in Anthony Lau’s stylised and unexpected revival"

"Looking like the portrait in Tom Hiddleston’s attic, he stalks the stage with a lean, kinetic, raptor’s mien, glorying in verbal combat in a meticulous Romanian accent, ready to pounce on any weakness."

"It’s a great, grandstanding, over the top performance, though even Rattigan’s most ardent cheerleaders would struggle to call this a great play."

"The depiction of homosexuality, though still guarded, is unusually direct for Rattigan. The play is also unusually autobiographical, fictionalizing his own relationship with a glamorous, dynamic but unloving father."

"Kynaston does a fine job of fleshing out a character who has only two states of being, alternately worshipful of and disgusted by his dad."

"The heightened staginess ramps up the excitement of a minor play, and provides a framework for Ben Daniels to strut his stuff. It’s an oddity, this, but worth seeing for him."

"Jarringly sober super-rich satire has lost its scandalous edge"

"Anthony Lau’s new revival of Terence Rattigan’s play is an admirable but relentlessly serious exercise in metatheatricality"

"Anthony Lau’s new production tests its 21st-century audience in different ways. We’re used to seeing tales of evil rich men leavened by Bond-style plot twists or Succession-esque satirical flourishes – instead, Rattigan’s play unfurls soberly and without remorse for either characters or audience."

"Designer Georgia Lowe takes her visual cues from 1930s showbiz, with a giant metatheatrical marquee overhead that illuminates character names when they enter (unfortunately, thanks to the layout of the auditorium, half the audience can’t see it)."

"Ben Daniels brings a compellingly lean, troubled, otherworldly energy to Gregor Antonescu"

"Rattigan paces things artfully but frustratingly slowly, leaving the audience scrambling to work out what this dangerous-seeming man wants with his puppyish son. Is it reconciliation? Or retribution?"

"No one in this play has the intellectual heft or bravery to remotely challenge Antonescu, and that makes it ultimately unsatisfying to watch."

"Ben Daniels’ Gregor is a magnificent monster”"

"Ben Daniels delivers a masterpiece of grotesquerie as a ruthless financier in this rarely revived Rattigan"

"Wealth, power, dirty deals and sexual exploitation: this rarely revived drama by Terence Rattigan certainly strikes a nerve right now."

"... the play leaps along in exuberantly grotesque fashion, far removed from conventional Rattigan stagings. It’s still an uneven piece, but it feels both pertinent and darkly entertaining here – thanks in no small degree to an enthralling central performance from Ben Daniels"

"... Daniels’ Gregor is a magnificent monster. He is, in truth, wildly OTT – but you can’t tear your eyes away from him."

"Things go awry, unfortunately, in the second half, when the action calls for more humanity and emotional sincerity, which seems at odds with Lau’s heightened, almost grimly farcical staging."

"... Daniels’ Gregor is a vile triumph."

"Shady financier uses his son as sexual collateral in sinister Rattigan revival"

"Rarely staged work, now at the National Theatre, intertwines fraught family dynamics with the threat of a global financial crash"

"There has never really been any other way to do a Terence Rattigan play except in the stiff and high melancholy style that was his genius. But here comes director Anthony Lau with an absurdist approach that rips through the gentility."

"This is not the usual Rattigan fare, and no surprise it rarely gets revived. Lau makes a case for doing so."

"The stage is made to look lit, the movement made to look like acrobatics, and the actors like they’re acting, giving the impression of a world as imaginary and contrived as the money they are talking about."

"Lau’s rampant vision works for the big stuff, but when the small stuff takes over... the domesticity just rattles weakly inside the vast shell Lau has created."

"Even in the age of Epstein this seems a stretch"

"A shady businessman offers his son up as a toy boy to a repressed industrialist — can the National Theatre really make sense of Terence Rattigan’s Sixties rarity?"

"What an odd evening this turned out to be."

"Sadly, Anthony Lau’s febrile expressionist production is so overheated that it’s impossible to ignore the implausibilities in the storyline."

"... that fine actor Ben Daniels is required to play the villain as a shrill, camp figure — think Rudolf Nureyev channelling Professor Moriarty."

"Lau ramps up the effects from the very start. The film noir music is so thunderous, it’s as if the vintage Hollywood composer Max Steiner and his orchestra are locked below stairs."

"Laurie Kynaston does his best with the role of Gregor’s son, Vassily... But the abruptness with which he embraces the old man’s bad ways is, frankly, bizarre."

"Hardcore Rattigan fans will want to see this production, but I’m not sure who else would."

"Rattigan’s murky reunion staged in silver-screen style"

"A financier facing corruption charges is reunited with his son in this high-concept mishmash of screwball comedy and financial thriller"

"Director Anthony Lau has put a thoroughly new spin on this old yarn but one which sadly drains the emotion and tragedy."

"The first half is pulled down by the weight of its laboured reinvention. The drama is so arch that it seems operatic – the bigger the performances, the more you feel removed from Rattigan’s subtexts."

"It engages more when some of the theatrics are dropped, a little too late."

"It is a shame because this is an explosive story about the corruptions of capitalism with present-day echoes of Jeffrey Epstein, but the concepts smother the drama."