Review Round-up: NT stages Scenes from an Execution

…major triumph for playwright Howard Barker…director Tom Cairns, designer Hildegard Bechtler or Fiona Shaw…(Tim McInnerny giving the perfect performance) and the prosecuting Cardinal (William Chubb equally good)…Bechtler’s brilliant setting of great slab-like mobile squares resembles a room full of giant Mark Rothko paintings, which change colour from oatmeal to grey to murky red under the lighting of Peter Mumford, with an evocative, muffled soundtrack by Ben and Max Ringham. This is one of the best uses of the difficult Lyttelton stage I’ve seen…There’s a pugnacious tone, and a liberated style, about Barker at his best that is unlike anything else on our stages today. And that is because he doesn’t write plays. He writes theatre. The audience is hungry.

Fiona Mountford
Evening Standard
★★★

…Full marks to the National, then, for reviving what is probably Barker’s best-known and most accessible piece, complete with a hulking great central part for a semi-clad Fiona Shaw…the play could morph into a blazing feminist tract or a fierce discussion about the compromises inherent in state-funded art. It dabbles tantalisingly with both, but as ever Barker tilts at too many windmills in one go and ends up saying nothing particularly original. It doesn’t help that every character is perpetually overstated, with a fierce insistence on anachronism. Still, it’s an overripe plum of a role for Shaw and there’s no doubting her commitment to the part’s physicality…And McInnerny’s equivocating Doge, patron cum tyrant, is a constant pleasure.

Paul Taylor
Independent
★★★★

…this 1986 play is one of Howard Barker’s most accessible and stringently witty works – a
searching study of the fraught relationship between artist, patron, critic and political culture…In a bravura performance, Fiona Shaw brilliantly communicates the animal energy, the dishevelled, uncircumspect sensuality and the caustic, uncompromising spirit of this artist…Tim McInnerny is wonderfully absurd and sinister as a frantic, idiotically self-pitying Doge…The production, admirably alive to the play’s mix of austere intellectual rigour and knockabout, anachronistic humour, presents the faux-costume drama in sets by Hildegard Bechtler that have the pure geometric beauty of modern abstract art…

Charles Spencer
Daily Telegraph
★★★

…Fiona Shaw plays the painter with wit and an Irish brogue, as well as her usual fervour…There is, however, something self-congratulatory about this play. Galactia…comes across as a self-portrait of Barker as a middle-aged woman, determined to show the bloody horror of war when what the authorities want is a celebration of power…Tom Cairns directs a robust and often absorbing production, with an especially fine supporting performance from Tim McInnerny and his amazingly long neck as the Doge, alternating between silky menace and vein-bulging rage. Hildegard Bechtler’s ambitious, multi-level set is evidently too clever for its own good, however. On the first night, the performance had to be stopped for several minutes when the scenery jammed. It would be unkind to suggest that this was the most entertaining moment in the show – but not untrue.

Libby Purves
Times
★★★★★