Visiting Mr Green

Synopsis

Jewish widower Mr. Green is almost hit by a speeding car driven by corporate executive Ross Gardiner. Found guilty of reckless driving Ross is ordered to spend the next six months making weekly visits to Mr. Green. What starts off as a beautifully crafted comedy about two people who resent being in the same room together develops into a gripping and poignant drama. Family secrets are revealed and old wounds reopened as both men come to understand and tolerate one another’s differences.

Our Review:

8 April 2008

Eight years after he first played the lonely old widower in Jeff Baron’s Visiting Mr Green at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Warren Mitchell revisits the role in London in a new production by Patrick Garland. The actor has grown much frailer (he is now 82), but still has a few years on Mr Green himself, who is eighty-six.

I don’t much like the play, which is over-schematic and over-sentimental, but there is a growing bond between the old man and his visitor that makes room for both a meeting of minds and a revelation of tragedy. And Mitchell himself, a doddery husk of the actor whose vigour and flintiness were hallmarks of both his great Willy Loman and his tetchy King Lear, gives a master class in geriatric slyness and emotional manipulation.

The American playwright reveals in a programme note that the encounter is loosely based on a portrait of his own relationship with his grandmother, although I do hope he didn’t try to ru...

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Latest User Review

ROBERT RAJU - 9 April 2008:

SUPER. I WENT LAST WEEK AND ROSS WAS SO INTO HIS CHARACTER. Poor old "Alf" was a little stiff but answered Ross with some good stuff. What I found really good was that Ross looked and talked like a 30 year old guy from New York. I can say this as I have a friend who has mannerism's and "questions back" just like that inthe show. For a 2 man show with the one scene it kept me interested till the end. ...

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