The Confessions London Reviews and Tickets
Show-Score Member Reviews (3)
See it if you seek out truthful, intimate displays of life. It is worth seeing for Eryn Jean Norvill and Pamela Rabe alone.
Don't see it if you want thrills and chaos. I found it beautifully (and sometimes uncomfortably) understated and quiet
See it if you want a very humane very beautiful play about the very ordinary
Don't see it if you don't want a very humane very beautiful play about the very ordinary
See it if You have a spare 2 hours
Don't see it if You want a captivating or a play that has any form of storyline. If you don’t like sitting with the house lights up
Critic Reviews (11)
“...maybe this is a truly biographical nugget in a play that blends life and art into something captivating.”
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“It is hard to pin this profoundly moving play down to its depths. It is a piece of alchemy and an expression of love.”
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“Zeldin, who directs, invites us to ponder the artificiality of theatre and the unreliability of memory.”
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“The entire endeavour serves as a reminder of just how extraordinary an ordinary life can be but also of the magical story-telling nature of theatre itself, the way it can take one person’s experience and forge it into a tale for the ages, a collective fable of self-realisation and hope.”
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“Zeldin’s direction is dynamic, using split-second reconfigurations of the set to give rapidly passing scenes the fluidity of overlapping memories. Much of the naturalistic dialogue is delivered in a breathless rush of competing voices...But there are moments of perfect silence and complete stillness, too, stretching pauses that powerfully underline the most significant moments of Alice’s life...Eryn Jean Norvill gives an extraordinary performance as Alice”
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“This is a play that reflects life’s great tragedies, everyday aches and excruciating losses. But, though Alice’s journey is difficult and netted with hurt, Zeldin’s script never demands sympathy. This is simply a presentation of one existence, albeit so beautifully crafted it can’t help but sting.”
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“It’s an intense piece of work but there is humour (especially in the evening class student archetypes). It ends abruptly but at just under two hours long and performed without an interval and spanning decades, it is compelling throughout in its telling of the story of an ‘ordinary’ woman whose life and achievements have been anything but.”
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“The play was inspired by Zeldin’s elderly mother’s “confessions” to him in 2020, suddenly spilling out all her hidden life to him in a recording. He has fashioned it into a fine, uplifting tribute that portrays the heroism of “ordinary” people with a warm wit and breadth of understanding.”
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