Review Round-up: Order Restored at Hampstead

Dominic Maxwell in The Times (four stars) - “While Christopher Luscombe's masterful production doesn't stint on the period trappings (bottle-green jackets and pressed brown slacks) it also gives us a timeless struggle between order and chaos ... Frayn studs his script with typically wry, philosophical one-liners that slip easily off his over-analytical characters' tongues. And their goal, at first murky, turns out to be survival itself. No, it's not quite a laugh riot like Noises Off or a head massage like Copenhagen. But after a slow set-up, with a lot of faces, this perfectly performed production turns into something remarkable: an ironic elegy for the days of the amateur that also nods to the need for change.”

Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph (three stars) - Christopher Luscombe’s production isn’t quite such a dark comic delight as his cracking revival of Alan Bennett’s Enjoy in the West End ... But I loved being reminded of a time when newspaper offices were devoid of computer terminals and information came from yellowing cuttings rather than from Google. And Frayn’s fictional paper’s fate eerily mirrors the current acute anxiety in the newspaper business where long established titles are collapsing with alarming frequency ... Alphabetical Order isn’t quite the lost comic classic I was hoping for, but it’s both entertaining and humane, and in these dark days, as we lurch back to the worst of the Seventies, perhaps that’s enough.”

Michael Billington in Guardian (four stars) - “All plays are dated, in that they are the product of a particular moment. So it is no barrier to the enjoyment of Michael Frayn's 1975 comedy that the kind of newspaper cuttings library in which it takes place has been superseded by digital archives … For the most part, the play is a witty philosophical comedy about the conflict between apparently contradictory, but ultimately intertwined, human impulses. At first I thought Christopher Luscombe's production lacking in brio. But it cleans up later by allowing the ideas room to breathe.”

Nick Curtis in the Evening Standard (one star) - “It’s not the setting - a newspaper cuttings library - that makes the play seem so dated. Or the idea newspaper employees can be selfish and stupid. It’s the suggestion that a collection of infantile caricatures could be funny … Frayn’s linguistic dexterity and intellectual playfulness is squandered in the mouths of idiot stereotypes … I don’t even think the play has a symbolic dimension. The two-dimensional characters are what they are. Luscombe directs with technical proficiency but can’t give it warmth or more than sporadic life.”

Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail (four stars) - “This is a play attractively short on bitterness. Maybe Miss Stubbs' characterisation of Lucy is a little hard to penetrate at times, but she and Miss Newsome's taut Lesley contrast well. Christopher Luscombe's production could make more of the reveal at the start of the second half. Here is the rare occasion which really needs a curtain. Maybe, as an inky-thumbed hack, I'm a sucker for the setting, but Alphabetical Order makes for an amiable, wry and sorrowful evening. Like Lady Nunn, it is hard to resist.”

- by Theo Bosanquet & Rhian Owen

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	Alphabetical Order (London & tour) - 22nd Apr 2009 reviews