The night is dark and full of reviewers – Game of Thrones: The Mad King critics round-up

Sarah Crompton, WhatsOnStage

★★★★★

“The actual opening is an extraordinary moment of theatre: a procession of rich coloured silks and fluttering banners, with kings and princes riding life-sized armoured horses, heads tossing as they move, a scrappy dog silhouetted barking at the scene. That dog, a manipulated puppet, is the sign of the love and care that has gone into the whole. No detail has been overlooked.”

Dominic Cavendish, The Telegraph

★★★★

“The most electrifying moments revolve around Michael Shaeffer’s scrawny, deeply strange Aerys, who has the distracted air of Lear on the heath but the villainy of Richard III, cackling as he taunts his son, or mocks Callum Woodhouse’s grief-wracked Baratheon, climactically crying “Burn them all!” as he lets loose his pyromaniac ire.”

Matt Barton, The Stage

★★★★

“Lamford’s design suggests how conflict shapes this world. The crossroads of her stage, carpeted in ash, force opposing factions to collide at the centre. Bethan Clark choreographs ballets of blades to the sound of clattering steel. Fighters take charge of magnified puppet selves, which looks incredible and ingeniously reflects how these characters are themselves puppeteered within the political power struggle.”

Alice Saville, The Independent

★★★★

“As well as drawing on the ancient Classics, this story of ambitious, vengeful kings has serious shades of Shakespeare – with added dragons. It feels right on this in-the-round, Elizabethan-inspired stage. And that’s a credit to the reliably brilliant Duncan Macmillan’s textured, witty adaptation. He can’t resist adding appropriately 16th-century flourishes (everyone says “mayhaps” an awful lot) but he never sacrifices intelligibility – which is lucky, because there are enough characters here for at least three normal plays.”

Mark Lawson, The Guardian

★★★★

“Actors in adaptations of screen material – such as the current The Silence of the Lambs – can choose whether to be avatars of the TV or film stars. Here, the performers must be plausible previews of their future television inheritors. Maxim Ays as Jaime Lannister, Michael Abubakar’s Ned Stark, the Cersei Lannister of Daisy Franks and Hughie O’Donnell’s Lord Varys might all be earlier portraits of the famous, but youth and new lines leave leeway for their own intonations. Even so, the greatest impact is made by characters featured in the main TV show only in dialogue or flashback: Princess Elia Martell and Prince Rhaegar Targaryen, viscerally played by Elizabeth Ayodele and Noah Ritter.”

Clive Davis, The Times

★★★

“Macmillan’s script is sorely lacking in poetry. Events plod forward, one after the other, and although Michael Shaeffer is a thoroughly compelling presence as the cruel and chronically unstable monarch Aerys, other performances seem nuance-free. Too many lines are simply shouted. You expect better of the RSC.”