Jury's out on The Trial

Michael Coveney, WhatsOnStage

★★★★★

"In Nick Gill's brilliant and imaginative adaptation, directed by Richard Jones, Rory Kinnear gives a tremendous performance"

"Jones, Kinnear and designer Miriam Buether do something different: in a banal, anodyne contemporary setting of a giant courtroom, Josef is a hopelessly humanised specimen"

Dominic Cavendish, Daily Telegraph

★★

"Even those who would walk on hot coals to watch Rory Kinnear strutting his theatrical stuff should hesitate before signing up for this stylish but punishing and oddly pedestrian account of The Trial "

"doubts start forming as to where this visually distinctive vision of Kafka’s nightmare is headed"

"I was left feeling less as though I’d seen justice done to the labyrinthine complexity of the book and more as if I’d witnessed a fine actor trapped in an arduous workout"

Michael Billington, Guardian

★★★

"Rory Kinnear was brilliant as Josef K"

"If Kinnear was a modern everyman, Kate O’Flynn was equally remarkable as the various women"

"But, as two hours passed without a break, Michael B began to feel a nervous sense of guilt. Why was his initial delight turning to faint boredom?"

Dominic Maxwell, The Times

★

"It’s a trial, all right. In fact, this jaunty, misconceived Kafka adaptation is one of the big duds of the year"

"The director, Richard Jones, has long plied eccentricity, sometimes to great effect, yet here his production’s peculiarity needs something normal to root it"

"though Rory K does his best to depict Josef K’s reasoned defiance and sweaty disintegration, there’s no menace for him to play against"

Andrzej Lukowski Time Out

★★★★

"while wags will declare this two-hour, no interval, unabashedly avant-garde show to itself be a bit of a trial, the fact is that its pummelling otherness is offset by two towering acting performances: Rory Kinnear, at the peak of his powers, and rising star Kate O’Flynn"

"It is a grotesque and darkly comic two hours in which Kinnear never leaves the stage and we never leave the tumult of K’s mind"

The Trial runs at the Old Vic until 8 August 2015.