Beat The Devil London Reviews and Tickets

Ralph Fiennes channels David Hare's sickened fury in 'raw, urgent' lockdown play... The piece has such immediacy, and Fiennes such understated charisma, that any fear of Covid-fatigue is overcome.'
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Fiennes...magically animates the stage, though he barely moves on it...An initial poetry in the language is lost to a flatter, more muscular polemic... It is the script’s comic ire that provides the high notes.'
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This is David Hare at his furious best... Whether you agree with his diagnosis or not, the piece grips in its light-touch incisiveness.'
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...the playwright wants to deliver a lecture too, which means that the personal memoir — laced with mordant humour and impeccably performed by Ralph Fiennes — is frequently shoved aside...'
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...magnificently realised by Fiennes, who under Nicholas Hytner's quietly efficient and detailed direction, uses all his own sensitivity and charisma to create a portrait of a man undone by an illness...'
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Ralph Fiennes narrates with effortless charisma...But for all the play’s damning enumeration of our government’s well-documented failings, Hare never hits the full, indignant stride of his polemical best.'
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Hare’s writing vibrates with rage. It’s also grippingly vivid, crackling with gallows humour, and illuminated by tenderness... This is focused, furious theatre; it leaves you deeply angry, but energised.'
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For a riveting, cathartic – and often surprisingly humorous – 50 minutes Ralph Fiennes paces the stage at the Bridge Theatre to deliver an account of Covid-19 that is as political as it is personal.'
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