“’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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“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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“Parts of this play feel distinctly moribund...I’m certainly pleased that it’s over and I can now reflect on a theme...that is offset by clunky dialogue and skew-whiff morality...This play is more fable than anything else...The dialogue is stilted and the pacing turtle-like, although there is a fascination in the otherworldliness of it...At times it does feel as if we are being sentenced.”
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“Although philosophically provocative, a man spending two decades on a barren plain is dramatically inert...The clarity and control that characterised Brook’s best work...is only a few short steps from banality when the material is this thin...To deal with a story that is more meditative than dramatic, Brook and Estienne treat it like a fairy tale...They give it the archetypal quality of a parable, but not the profundity it seems to be searching for.”
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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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