“’The Prisoner' asks audience members to fill in blank spaces with their own imagination. What it lacks is the sense of inevitability...the feeling that every gesture and image onstage is there for a reason and that if you just concentrate on what’s before you, a pattern and logic will emerge...The problem may be that the text here provides too much information...The production feels long and oddly cluttered by its gnomic dialogue."
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"The mind that will enjoy Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne’s 'The Prisoner' is one that’s more content in stillness than mine...I admit that, because of this slowness and despite my sympathy with the play's anti-incarceration message, I don’t find the work entertaining or engrossing; it’s a challenging way to spend 70 minutes...'The Prisoner' offers deep moral seriousness and a chance to sit with the faithful in contemplation. If you need something like that in your practice too, then go."
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“The performers are possessed of a gravity, marked by emotions carefully held back, that feels connected to French classical tragedy. But everything is done with such economy of means that the smallest gesture has an enormous effect...’The Prisoner’ has a spiritual quality one doesn't often find; this is especially true in its highly effective use of silence. Strange and terrible things happen in 'The Prisoner', but each is given ample time and space to sink in.”
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“A fascinating parable, and Brook and Estienne have brought it to remarkable life...’The Prisoner’ is stunning in its simplicity and universality...Brook’s profound understanding of Dostoevsky and Beckett informs ‘The Prisoner’. Though the place is never specified, the landscape of ‘Waiting for Godot’ is conjured up before our eyes...A man sitting alone in silence is one of the most profound images of the quest for self-knowledge that we’ll ever see on stage.”
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"Hiran Abeysekera makes a compelling lead...But aside from an entertaining but deeply silly sequence where he befriends a passing rat, this is static, ponderous fare....Brook’s signature approach, which creates a globe-trotting hodgepodge of borrowed philosophies and ideas, also feels dated in a world that is becoming more and more attuned to the unhelpfulness of lumping all non-western cultures together."
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“This is a wafer-thin evening, beautifully performed...and presented with a pleasing austerity and a less pleasing childlike solemnity as if we are being handed down a dose of spiritual wisdom...Its studied otherworldliness detracts from its effectiveness. It is beautiful, but never urgent in addressing the difficult world we have made for ourselves...Although there are moments of real grace and invention, almost as if in mid-sentence, the staging does not invite emotional involvement."
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“In Hiran Abeysekera’s beautiful central performance, we see him, over the years, feel his way towards a resolution, through his interactions with local people, visitors, passers-by. And the whole show achieves a magnificent balance of stillness, relaxation, and narrative tension; compelling us to pause, to breathe, and to reflect, but also moving the story towards its end with the inevitability and energy of a natural force, harnessed by an absolute master."
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“Beautifully presented, and created with calm singularity of movement and poise from an impeccable cast, it is nevertheless hugely conflicting...The framing of it all as exotic is darkly troubling, as it makes it exclusive rather than inclusive, the multinational cast members are ‘other'...The questions then become confused, the metaphors impenetrable, and the issue of who is the criminal, who the prisoner and who the observed becomes convoluted beyond resolution or care."
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