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- Lyonesse opened to a sold-out Harold Pinter Theatre in London on Wednesday
- READ MORE: Lyonesse review: Sunset Boulevard meets Ab Fab set in Cornwall… with Lily James and Kristin Scott Thomas serving up the stardust
A new Me Too-inspired play boasting an impressive cast including Lily James and Kristin Scott-Thomas has been branded an ’embarassment’ in a slew of scathing reviews.
Playwright Penelope Skinner revealed she actually rewrote her entire script after receiving lukewarm feedback over the first version of Lyonesse from a theatre team.
However, if early reviews of the production, which runs at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London until 23 December, are anything to go by, it may be in need of a second rewrite.
Oxford-based Skinner’s script, directed by Ian Rickson, has been branded ‘chaos’, ‘shambling’ and difficult to believe by unimpressed critics, with one branding Oscar nominee Kristin Scott Thomas ‘hammy’.
The plot follows Elaine, a formerly famous actress who attracts the attention of Kate, a film executive who wants to hear her Me Too story. Meanwhile Kate’s husband (also a film director) is pestering her to have another child. Soon, Kate, Elaine and Elaine’s neighbour Chris develop a keen interest in each other – but from there, critics say the plot ‘descends into chaos’.
Likening the play to an ‘undergrad experiment’, The Times’s Clive Davis argued that even the star-studded cast of Lily James (Kate), Kristin Scott-Thomas (Elaine) and James Corrigan could not make up for the script.
Critics across the board have panned Penelope Skinner’s new play Lyonesse which opened at the Harold Pinter Theatre last night
Speaking to the Guardian, Skinner, who shot to fame in 2011 when The Village Bike opened at London’s Royal Court, said she began writing Lyonesse in 2019 and ended up with a first script that was four hours long and ‘a little crazy’, in her own words.
‘It was not a play that anyone would want to watch,’ she admitted, before adding she went back to the drawing board to rewrite the whole thing. The only element she remained was Scott-Thomas’s character Elaine.
She also discussed the difficulty, as a playwright, in leaving actors and a director to take a script you have written to interpret in their own way.
The Me Too-inspired play, starring Lily James (pictured) and Kristin Scott-Thomas has been criticised for its ‘shambling’ script
The Evening Standard’s theatre critic Nick Clark was left wondering how Lily James and Kristin Scott-Thomas had joined the cast in the first place
‘It can be that you think you’ve written one story and then it turns out you’ve written something quite different,’ she said – although she added she found the process of letting go was positive in this instance.
However as critics across the board question the writing and direction in the production, it seems the audience didn’t quite buy into Skinner’s and Rickson’s vision…
THE DAILY MAIL
The Mail’s Patrick Marmion gave Lyonesse a modest three-star review with the dazzling starlets in the cast helping to sell-out the first showing of the play.
However aside from Lily James’s ‘flawless’ acting, Marmion described the plot as ‘a laboured and lacklustre affair’.
He wrote: ‘It’s like a curious mishmash of Sunset Boulevard and Ab Fab set in Cornwall.’
Marmion said the three hour play needed ‘more gags’ to sustain the audience.
He added that the Me Too commentary was lacking a new take, writing: ‘What we get instead is a solemn mission to promote sorority and re-run the MeToo debate yet again – with no new insights.’
THE TIMES
Clive Davis for The Times said Skinner’s play might be something you’d expect to see at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival – and later put down to ‘an undergrad experiment’.
Despite direction from Ian Rickson, Davis suggested the play seems to move along ‘at random’, and he was left wondering why such big stars wanted to be involved with a script full of ‘risible dialogue’.
After the three characters, Kate, Elaine and Chris develop a bond, Davis said the script ‘descends into chaos’.
He argued the script was so poor that there was only so much Scott-Thomas and James could to with it.
At the end of his scathing review, Davis presumed the play is titled Lyonesse after a mythical kingdom in Cornwall that became submerged overnight in the sea.
‘If only this utter embarrassment of a production could meet the same fate,’ he wrote.
THE EVENING STANDARD
The Evening Standard’s critic Nick Clark was among the voices questioning why Lily James and Kristin Scott-Thomas, whom he described as ‘hammy’, got involved with Skinner’s production in the first place.
He suggested the aim of the play, to expose the difficulties of being a woman, failed to make a statement with the audience, who are instead forced to watch ‘underdeveloped’ characters.
Clark described Kate as a ‘wet blanket’, Elaine as a ‘raging narcissist’ and Chris as a ‘stereotype’ as the trio form a friendship.
Much like the other critics, he criticised the plot, which ‘lurches improbably forward as if it is being made up on the spot’.
He speculated that Skinner was aiming for some kind of ‘absurdism’ in her plot and script, but didn’t agree that the style had come off as intended.
Describing the play as a ‘car crash’, he wrote: ‘This seems like an assemblage of half-baked ideas and lazy conceits.’
THE TELEGRAPH
Kristin Scott-Thomas plays Elaine, a once sought-after actress who has a Me Too story to tell about her time in the limelight
Serena Davis for The Telegraph argued that Lily James and Kristin Scott-Thomas, the latter of whom provides ‘flashes of inspiration’.
In a review that found more to enjoy within the play, Davis argued the plot didn’t quite fit the category of Me Too; rather, coercive control as both Kate and Elaine are largely dominated by their male partners.
As the play depicts domineering men and submissive women, Davis suggested some of the symbolic devices were old and tired, and have ‘been around as long as Ibsen’.
Although she praised the performances of the lead actresses, Davis said the way in which men are demonised means the play gives off a ‘whiff of a lecture’.
THE i
Fiona Mountford for The i described the play as ‘the most barking thing I have seen in a long time’, which descends down ‘a rabbit hole of bewilderment’.
During the first act of the play, Mountford revealed she truly questioned how Skinner expected an audience to take the production ‘even halfway seriously’.
When the production returned for its second act, however, her bewilderment turned into a hope that the audience would soon ‘be put out of our misery’.
Much like many critics, Mountford agreed Scott-Thomas and James’s big names in lights brought in the audience, but were unable to make up for the plot.
She wrote: ‘Star casting will always work its magic, regardless of the quality of the drama, which explains the arrival of the inexcusably poor Lyonesse.’