Unreachable, Royal Court (w/ Matt Smith)

To be fair, if you take out all of the bits that Amanda Drew couldn't remember and needed to refer to the script that looks about right.

I saw the 4th preview last night too. This is a play that should never be locked.

Some spoilers follow. . .

If a play is about an obsessive artistic quest for perfection, which the title both suggests and threatens is "unreachable," then Anthony Neilson should abandon the idea of a press night, and just keep working on the show, rewriting it every day to the very last day, August 6th. Critics could come on any random day.

As others have implied, there is a specific ending already in place, which Neilson is working towards, and it makes sense that he should never quit working towards it, attempting a "perfect" play, just as Matt Smith's Maxim wants to film "perfect light."

The obvious cinematic inspiration for this show is the documentary, "Burden of Dreams," which depicts film director, Werner Herzog and actor Klaus Kinski, at war with nature and at war with each other as they try to make an insanely impossible film, "Fitzcarraldo." In the documentary, Herzog almost has a nervous breakdown as he attempts to manually push a three hundred ton ship over a hill, and deal with the maniacal egotist, Kinski, who took over from Jason Robards half way through the shoot, and who also will not compromise one inch on his own artistic vision.

The documentary is one of the best ever made about the borderline between art and madness.

Here, together with his actor collaborators, Neilson explores the burden, and meaning, of Matt Smith's Maxim's dream quest for "perfect light." Jonjo O'Neill's Ivan is a thinly veiled Klaus Kinski, while Matt Smith's Maxim is Herzog.

All the characters in the show have their own interpretation of what art means, and it is this consideration of the different meanings of art to different people, what it is, how it is created, that Neilson is exploring.

For the most part, Jonjo O'Neill's Kinski makes for such hilariously irrepressible broad comedy that he eats the subtler parts of the show, though Matt Smith does a great job at balancing comedy with a more introspective interpretation of what it means to be Maxim.

The first act is a broad comedy tour de force.

The second act is still scripts-in-hand, new scenes written overnight, edging closer to Neilson's end vision. But Neilson is still some way from bridging the gap to the end scene, with meandering story points that are pertinent, but insufficiently focused, and drastic jarring tonal changes, and it's a damn shame if he has to stop trying to get there on Friday. Maxim would not stop, he would keep reaching, as would Werner Herzog, and Neilson should obviously fall in line behind them, and fight to hone his own crazy vision to the very end of the run.

I liked every actor in this: Tamara Lawrance's depiction of the actor as sociopath, Richard Pyros' DP's opportunism, Amanda Drew's producer's machiavellian devotion to her director, Genevieve Barr's pragmatic financier, Matt Smith's self-destructive director and most of all, Jonjo O'Neill's unrestrained bonkers rendition of the artist that was Klaus Kinski!

This work is unfinished, and should not be finished, if it is true to itself. I'll be back. Fascinating.

4 stars 😊

4 stars in the Standard: Evening Standard

Amazing

Amazing

Loved it

Loved it

5 stars

Isn't the general consensus that SpiceShack likes something he/she/they put their money into it?!

OH MY GOD!

I went expecting nothing

And funniest thing I have seen in ages

ENTIRE cast amazing and give wonderful performances

I mean on award worthy levels- ALL of them- the delivery is impeccable

LOVED Matt Smith and I am not usually a fan of his at all

Jonjo O'Neill also hysterical and Amanda Drew has a lovely skirt she wears at one point- so elegantly flared

The material has weaknesses and the second half is certainly less sure of itself

But goodness it is a terrific evenings entertainment

I cannot recommend it highly enough

There is still some corpsing and the fact there is no script means you are never quite sure what is improvised and/or was added that day during rehearsals

I think amongst the best plays on at the moment

Audience in fits of laughter throughout and also cannot recall last time I had such fun at the theatre

Oo-er, how can the real thing ever live up to this hype?!

I mean, Unreachable is scheduled to finish on 6th August and the next show in that auditorium is kicking off on 22nd September, so there's the time for an extension, but they don't appear to have sold out any performances, so it doesn't look like they'd have any particular need to extend. Also it looks like both auditoria are going dark for a month once Unreachable and Open Court shut up shop on the 6th, so I wonder if they've got some sort of maintenance or something planned during that period. Not beyond the realms of possibility, but I don't think it looks at all likely tbh.

Don't know how well tickets have been selling, but I would have thought it would be more likely to transfer somewhere in the West End rather than extend (a la Hangmen).

Well spotted! This play seems to have a huge dialogue with Chekhov's plays, and in fact there are so many rich aspects to it that I realised it was mostly passing me by, even whilst I very much enjoyed what I did notice. As the second half got underway, it hit me that this play is a perfect example of the ideal Royal Shakespeare Company new play, with its strong relationship to the classical theatre traditions, and of course Anthony Neilson was the RSC Literary Associate for many years. The RSC must be kicking themselves that they have effectively nurtured this seminal play but never got the chance to produce it themselves.

The Royal Court usually shuts down its public face during August, even closing the bar and kitchen, and I agree with Baemax that it's very unlikely to spontaneously extend, although I suppose there's a very remote possibility that they have always planned a possible, very limited, extension. But I really wouldn't expect it because it would mean staffing the building when everyone's expecting an enforced holiday.

This was absolutely fascinating. It is, I believe, also deeper than its hilarious (at times) surface suggests. What we have is a reflection on acting and truth, overtly through the lack of empathy that the lead actress feels yet further refracted in the performance and direction whereby performers are able to switch from being in and dropping out of character. Film being the realistic medium is subverted by theatre, the medium of the imagination,. Props are labelled as such, set is minimal, scenes are announced (so far so Brechtian) but beyond this the cast are free to have a dialogue with the performance as it takes place, able to laugh, glance at the audience and appreciate each other and the audience response.

So a story about a fixed, tightly controlled medium is told to us through the incomplete, blueprint that is the theatre. Film can only fail to be perfect because it has to be finished. Theatre never is, every performance is a new attempt and, even at the end of the run, there is the spectre of the next production and its new attempt.

The actors corpse, not because they are going wrong, but because they are attempting to be better than last time, even funnier, even more truthful. Yet where does that truth come from? Not through Stanislavskian (and by extension Chekhovian, hence the use of Russian names) soul searching but because it's their job. Our job is to pay and to watch them do their job. In our doing that we, ourselves, join them as partners in the quest for unattainable perfection.