"Mark Thompson’s design illustrates the production’s sweet spot: a technicolour combination of comic book and live action, Englishness as an aesthetic and a myth. 'Jack Absolute' is more content to cuddle up to that myth than to seriously challenge it, but as pure summer fizz, it goes down a treat."
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"It’s funny. It’s fine. We all need a chuckle at the moment. But ‘Jack Absolute Flies Again’ isn’t anything more than the sum of its laughs. "
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"This knowing mix of satire, filth, clowning, pastiche, wartime derring-do and romance absolutely hit my sweet spot. It won’t be to everyone’s taste, but not even the hardest heart could entirely resist its machine-gun barrage of humour."
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"The script has a self-consciously Boy’s Own ‘whizzo’ feel and drips with arch knowingness and nods to its own theatricality, which is amusing enough but prevents us from caring much about what happens to anyone."
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"There isn’t room to summarise all the complications of the plot. Suffice to say that Quentin delivers her fruity double entendres with aplomb, and even gets a chance to reveal her talent as a vaudevillean."
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"This is the second consecutive show at the National to glance nostalgically back at a bygone Britain and present a sentimentalised picture. For me, at almost three hours on its final preview night, this comedy felt forced, unoriginal and drawn out."
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“Where things start to go awry is when Jack Absolute Flies Again starts not being a comedy. It’s set during the war, there are difficult moments to explore, but this play tries to be too many things at once. The result is a near-three-hour long show, and towards the end you start to realise you really can have too much of a good thing”
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"For the most part 'Jack Absolute Flies Again' is content to deal in comfortable nostalgia of the barrel-rolled hair and bomber-jacket variety, familiar wartime tropes given a sitcom sheen. It’s always relatively entertaining, often very funny indeed, but its frothiness becomes tiresome after a while and it’s more celebratory than interrogative of the time it’s portraying."
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