Berberian Sound Studio

Unlike the film the director appears far to late in the play, his input, actually, starts to generate more interest and the fact that he speaks English helps with the understanding of the material. The set was fab though considering the space they have to work with.

There is a fair bit of Italian spoken I’m afraid.

Saw this last night and was really looking forward to it but it didn't quite live up to my expectations.

The set does look great with very good attention to detail. The first scene is a good comic start that sets the scene (I was in stalls B25 and got a bit of watermelon splash) but it then doesn't do a huge amount in the next 50 mins.

Yes its builds up the characters and storyline a bit but I don't think it does much with the tension. This comes in in the last 30 mins and comes in quite sharply. It comes in well though, with excellent use of 3D sound around the theatre and the introduction of the director. But it feels over all a bit quickly.

I think what this needs is to either bring in the tension earlier, either with the introduction of the director earlier or showing Gilderoy's decline earlier. Or by adding an extra 20 mins allowing for a longer period to build up the tension. There's a few 2 hour no interval plays around at the moment or they could use one of the tapes from home to insert an interval.

There is a lot of Italian spoken in the play which I don't think harms the play at all. The acting and the rough translations from other actors are enough to understand what's going on and in a way lets you know what Gilderoy is experiencing.

Its still in preview so hopefully they'll do a little bit of tweaking.

Overall a reasonable play, good use of the small theatre and worth a visit. 7/10.

Mitts off. You can keep your Bateman, but D'Artagnan is mine.

Would say I almost completely agree with previous commenters. It starts of well (and funny) but then drags through a very extended middle. Thought the set was particularly cluttered, the sound effects worked well though. The highlight is definitely the melon massacre.

The Italian is bearable but I think taking it down by another 10% would probably have helped overall comprehension.

It’s not the worst 90 minutes I’ve spent in a theatre but I don’t feel a strong urge to recommend it either.

My understanding of the wardrobe choices for him leads me to believe you will be satisfied on one of these fronts.....

Saw this last night, and it's good on atmosphere, Enzo Cilenti and Tom Brooke are terrific, but it fails to add up to anything.

Some spoilers follow. . .

I've not seen the original film, but my response to this was that it should have been a film.

Tom Brooke plays a sensitive movie sound guy, out of his depth in Italy, unable to speak the language, unfamiliar with and horrified by the kind of Italian horror film he's working on (think Dario Argento's Suspiria, all diabolical murders and witches). He misses his Mum, he's vulnerable and impressionable, and he starts to lose his bearings. . .

This sort of thing works fantastically on film, eg Polanski's "Repulsion," where all kinds of strange angles and lenses and impossible dream sequences can be filmed to provide entree to a decaying and fragile mind, but in the theatre, Brooke has an impossible task, where he just has to look at and react to perfectly ordinary looking filmmaking processes, and compel his already haunted eyes to become more and more expressive in each successive scene.

So to get inside Brooke's head, to experience his disconnect with the film he's making, with it's casual misogyny and overall misanthropy, we really need more scripted interactions with the man making the film, Luke Pasqualino's director, Santini, yet inexplicably (perhaps I'd understand this if I'd seen the film), Santini doesn't even show up until we are three quarters in, and only then for a fleeting appearance. This means that the misanthropist who triggers Brooke, never triggers us, so what's the point of all this?

Other than the brilliant Brooke, whose every tentative and haunted interaction make you want to give him a hug, and thus effortlessly and usefully draw you into a shaggy dog story that will never pay off, it is Enzo Cilenti's ruthless producer character, Francesco, who actually gives this rambling show some sense of threat. It is his evidently raging fury at his incompetent film crew, craftily contained behind a seemingly civilised monotone, that gripped me, as an audience member to my seat for most of the running time. The whole show becomes: What will Enzo do?

And thanks to these two actors creating two compelling characters, I was never bored, only disappointed, when I realised that the underlying story, of how and to what a vulnerable man starts to lose his mind, is never properly told.

Still, the atmospherics are good. Like the National Shed's "The Hush," in which two foley artists faked, live on stage, the sounds of Tobias Menzies' dreams and memories, using fresh fruits and whatnot, we get to see two foley artists in action, with their water melons and mics, creating the sounds of a misogynist horror movie. But unlike "The Hush," we don't get sufficently get inside the head of the protagonist. And neither Luke Pasqualino's fictional horror director, nor director Tom Scutt, know how to get us there.

Despite the failed dramatic and thematic thrust of the piece, for the atmospherics, and for Brooke's and Cilenti's evocative performances, 3 stars from me.

I think the idea is that you don't follow the Italian, not that you sit there thinking "This is just like being at my place in San Gimignano".

Personally I don't speak a word of Italian beyond buon giorno, grazie and prego - and I suppose pizza and cappuccino! I didn't find this hard to follow, thought the sound design was amazing, was thrilled to see Tom Brooke back in action and found it creepy as hell.

If I recognise any of the few words I know in Italian, one can only presume that real Italian speakers in the audience will be outraged.

The running time of the play and the running time of the film are almost exactly the same ( taking into account the credits for the film and a two minute delay in the start time of the play. The film is dark and claustrophobic and rather vague in its plotting with LOTS of Italian spoken and the play is much the same. The untranslated Italian is fine because it allows us to share the alienation Gilderoy (Tom Brooke) is experiencing. I can see why Tom Scutt and Joel Horowood were attracted to the piece because the film itself feels stagebound and the chance to create all those sound effects would be fun for them and presumably for the audience. But much like the film, it's dull and obtuse. And while it's well-intentioned and done creatively it is, I am sorry to say, instantly forgettable.

More of an experiment in sound than traditional Theatre, found enough to keep me interested, wasn’t distracted by the Italian as it added to the isolation and had some very impressive staring to the middle distance as they were ‘watching’ the scenes.

I thought this was really good. Watched the film a few weeks back and was very worried. Funny how a different medium works in a completely different way for the same piece of work. Understood more of the Italian than I thought. And Tom Brooke was very good. (Special mention to the sound effects crew).