The Gods Weep

Synopsis

The Gods Weep focuses on the life of a CEO whose global business may have grown to a scale that is uncontainable. Colm has taken a lifetime to build his empire. With brutal rigor he has shaped the world around him in his own image. As time moves on his decision-making abilities increasingly fail him and the world he has created begins to fracture. The power struggle that ensues reveals the corruption and unstoppable forces at work in a world where corporate greed and national security frighteningly overlap.

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 18 March 2010

It is over 20 years since Jeremy Irons played an impressive Richard II for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and he brings all his old charm and crack-voiced swagger to the role of a modern King Lear in Dennis Kelly’s new play The Gods Weep.

But Kelly’s use of the Shakespearean template isn’t half as imaginative, or successful, as David Greig’s Dunsinane sequel to Macbeth. Still, it’s good to see the RSC stretching its playwrights and wonderful to see an actor like Jonathan Slinger, scintillating as both King Richards in recent years, donning a grey suit as a power-crazy businessman, proving himself a new Ian Holm.

Slinger’s role, like so much else in the first half, evaporates in a welter of stilted battle scenes and loose threads, and you can’t help feeling that the drastic cuts made to the 180-page text during rehearsals are reflected in the hesitancy of the performances and the production b...

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Latest User Review

Micky - 2 April 2010:

Acting was great but play was pretentious and punching above its weight. Preferred the live cat to the dead one! So bleak and violent left you ultimately unstisfied. Too nihilistic to be fulfilling as a piece of theatre....

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