Will Keen & Frances O'Connor
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Review Round-up: Tom & Viv's Intense Double Act

Tom and Viv, Michael Hastings’ controversial 1984 play about the volatile relationship between poet TS Eliot and his disturbed first wife, received its first major London revival on Friday (22 September 2006), opening at the Almeida Theatre for a limited run to 4 November 2006 (See News, 24 Jul 2006). Lindsay Posner directs Will Keen and Frances O'Connor in the title roles.

In Cambridge in 1915, awkward American graduate Tom (Keen) meets the wild Vivienne Haigh-Wood (O’Connor) and a whirlwind romance leads to a hasty marriage. But as Tom finds literary success, Viv’s volatility becomes harder to bear. Tom and Viv premiered at the Royal Court in 1984 and was made into a 1994 film starring Willem Dafoe and Miranda Richardson.

First night critics were full of praise for both the play and the performances, with many giving Posner’s production four stars. Some expressed reservations, however, about whether the issues in the play are really relevant to modern audiences, and commented that the play began to lose momentum in Act Two.

Nicholas de Jongh in the Evening Standard (4 stars) - “A scandal of a personal, social and literary kind is unearthed in Tom and Viv, thanks to the sleuthing of its author, Michael Hastings. This powerful production by Lindsay Posner, in which Frances O'Connor's astonishingly raw and wracked performance as TS Eliot's first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, carries the play's dramatic and emotional charge, arrives two decades after Tom and Viv's London premiere. Yet it shows this tragi-comedy of pre-war manners and morals has not lost its high-level impact…. In short, sharp, cinematic scenes, which Posner swathes in too much dim lighting, too many black-outs, unatmospheric music and blandly minimal sets, Hastings presents young Eliot as an uneasy American outsider…. Anna Carteret's Rose, a fine, down-market Lady Bracknell… Benjamin Whitrow transforming Viv's vacuous father into an old buffer running out of steam; and moustachioed Robert Portal, genially radiating stupidity as Maurice, all spark amusement in their bemused culture-clashes with Eliot…. O'Connor's extraordinarily pitiful Vivienne, her voice pitched a few decibels above conventionality's level, moves with the looselimbed ease of the chronically uninhibited or volatile.”

- by Caroline Ansdell

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	Tom & Viv - 25th Sep 2006 reviews