'Tennessee Williams’s experimental late-career work, which premiered at this very theatre in 1967, is revived in ultra meta-textual production'

'The production itself is a delight: strange and profound.'

'Kate O’Flynn plays Clare; Zubin Varla is her brother Felice. They are the sole remaining members of a theatre troupe, whose entire cast and crew have abandoned them along with a note: “Your sister and you are insane.” Clare – who turned up to the theatre drunk and skittish, flinching at her own shadow – wants to cancel the performance. Felice insists that the show must go on. “Some necessary things are impossible,” says Clare. “And some impossible things are necessary,” says Felice. “We are performing tonight.”'

'The play within a play is meandering and hard to follow – especially since Clare is only half-committed, making cuts wherever she pleases, indicating those cuts to Felice by playing a C# on the piano. It’s funny and absurd at first, especially in contrast to Felice’s over-zealous enthusiasm, as he simpers, over-acts, and scuttles back and forth from the stage to the sound desk in a frenzy.'

'it was once described by the playwright as “my most beautiful play since Streetcar, the very heart of my life”. This production is empathetic and eccentric enough to do it justice.'

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'Kate O’Flynn and Zubin Varla give mesmerising performances in Sam Yates’ finely judged production'

'The Two Character Play sees [Tennessee Williams] at his most daring. Director Sam Yates’ staging brings it back to Hampstead Theatre, where it first premiered in 1967, and uses modern theatrical wizardry to restore all its mould-breaking power.'

'It’s set in a chilly, dream-like theatre where a brother and a sister are putting on a play - but the rest of the cast have deserted them, the script isn’t finished, and they’re rapidly parting ways with reality after their parents’ deaths. Kate O’Flynn and Zubin Varla are mesmerising to watch as these siblings, singing melancholy little songs or blowing bubbles as they desperately try to find a fitting conclusion to their endless imprisoning childhood.'

'Onstage video cameras capture all of O’Flynn’s wonderfully heightened gestures and Varla’s wry impatience in huge projections that fill the stage’s back wall. And the pair deliver masterful shifts in accent and mood, slipping out of their languid Southern drawls to deliver wry Estuary-accented asides to each other.'

'Yates’ production has been long delayed by the pandemic but it feels like he never stopped thinking about this fascinating play, either. He knows just when to jolt an audience and when to let us luxuriate in the odd, nostalgic world of Williams’ past.'

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'It’s a bold, challenging piece, suffused in the playwright’s guilt about his sister... What’s remarkable about it is the way it manages to convey the terror of confinement and the confusion of paranoia, while at the same time keeping an analytical distance. In the melodramatic play-within-a-play Williams seems almost to parody himself, but by framing it with tense exchanges between the acting couple, the writer opens out the way he fought with himself and his work.

Yates’s fine, intelligent production embraces that vocabulary: here the action plays out on a half-dressed stage (design by Rosanna Vize), the actors push the scenery around, manage the sound effects and sometimes address the onstage cameras so their faces are magnified on the upstage wall. It’s a staging that celebrates the radical streak in Williams’s work and meets its double focus: we see the play, we see the pain that goes into the play, we see the tormented ambivalence of the artist towards both his creation and its source.

O’Flynn and Varla are excellent: she’s defiant, volatile and painfully vulnerable; he’s driven, clenched, enraged by his sister but equally protective towards her. By the end, it’s clear neither of them can leave: they are locked into the theatre, into their relationship with each other and into the play they must keep performing... it’s a powerful articulation of loneliness and the gnawing terror of madness.'

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