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Back from a mini tour of Yorkshire and Stockport and cheering for supporting act Indignation Meeting
The Fever Syndrome
Great acting and arresting ideas are marred by an over-written effort that risks blinding us with facts, says MARY CONWAY
ALISTAR FINDLAY is mesmerised by this multiple ‘Visions of Scotland’ assault on the audience’s eyes and senses
The Star's critics ANGUS REID, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA reviews I Am Love, The Penguin Lessons, Freaky Tales, The Thicket
MAYER WAKEFIELD has reservations about the direction of a play centered on a DVLA re-training session for three British-Pakistani motorists
New releases from Steve Knightley, Jupiter & Okwess, Jason Palmer, Lisa Knapp and Gerry Driver, Kin'Gongolo Kiniata, Ingrid Laubrock/Tom Rainey, Dan Sealey, Simin Tande, PAZ
JOHN GREEN relishes photography that unfolds a longstanding and poetic relationship with Leeds
A uncomfortably misogynistic authorial voice that sometimes seems to lack insight troubles FIONA O’CONNOR
The Fever Syndrome
Hampstead Theatre
April 5 2022
IT’S a pity that a play with so many arresting ideas and such relevance to the modern world should find itself mired in excessive detail and dead-end arguments. Sadly, this is the case with Hampstead Theatre’s premiere of Alexis Zegerman’s latest offering.
Not that the ingredients for a first-rate drama aren’t there. Professor Richard Miles, played by the inimitable Robert Lindsay, is a renowned IVF maestro who has provided thousands of desperate men and women with babies they could not otherwise have borne. Richard is about to receive a lifetime achievement award second only to the Nobel Prize and, in the eyes of the public, is an undoubted luminary. His family have gathered for the presentation event, and all should be ripe for celebration except…
…the professor is deep in the clutches of Parkinson’s disease; his family of assorted offspring and others are more diverted by their battle with the unpalatable realities of life than with his glory; meanwhile his granddaughter, Lily, carries a genetic malfunction that is the fever syndrome of the play’s title.
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