Were London Critics Moved by Kim Cattrall in Whose Life Is It Anyway?

Kim Cattrall, known for playing the alluring Samantha Jones on HBO's Sex and the City, is now playing paraplegic Claire Harrison in Brian Clark's Whose Life Is It Anyway? in the West End. The play, which marks Cattrall's British stage debut, opened at the Duke of York's Theatre on January 25. Did critics find the production stirring?

Here is a sampling of what they had to say:

Benedict Nightingale of The London Times: "Cattrall's performance is strong enough to make us care about her fate. Maybe her Claire isn't as angry as the text requires, but you feel her pain, appreciate her wry bravado, and, not least, sense how awful it is to have ordinary desires in a body that cannot express them. And she achieves that with nothing but a mouth, keen eyes and sallow cheeks: some feat!"

Nicholas de Jongh of The Evening Standard: "Even though Kim Cattrall plays a paraplegic, confined to a hospital bed throughout Whose Life Is It Anyway?, her sex appeal never wilts. Her emotive and vocal powers ultimately prove strong enough to give Brian Clark's feeble tragi-comedy about euthanasia the kiss of theatrical life… Early on Sir Peter allows Cattrall to play Claire as a model of unrelenting perkiness and jocularity, when the role calls for irony and flippancy. Yet once the sculptor launches her campaign of self-destruction the performance takes wing. Charged with the vitality of desperation, voice quaking, face haggard, Cattrall acquires the ghostly, ghastly air of someone fighting to end a life, which is not without hope. It is a performance of haunting glory."

Michael Billington of The Guardian: "Although Cattrall gives a tremendous performance, I feel the piece itself is much less open-minded than Clark and his director, Peter Hall, claim. Clark's theme is the freedom to live or die; and he focuses the debate on a sculptor, Claire Harrison, who has spent five months in hospital with a severed spinal cord… I admire Clark for dramatising a momentous issue. And by making the protagonist a woman rather than a man, as in the original, he turns the play into an intriguing battle against a medical patriarchy. But the debate has moved on since 1978… Still Cattrall is superb as Claire: behind the surface resilience and smiling irony, she suggests a woman who demands the dignity of choice and aches with the loss of her sensual life."

Charles Spencer of The Telegraph: "In real life you would never find yourself fancying a quadriplegic, but in the theatre I certainly found myself fancying Cattrall. The actress's potent sexuality becomes part of the point her character is making… At first I feared Cattrall was going to come to grief on the West End stage, like several American screen stars before her. She initially talks in a strange sing-song voice, and the relentless defensive jokes the dramatist has supplied her with seem laboured. Before long, however, both play and performance begin to grip… She is often extremely funny, but she also persuades the viewer that for Claire, this really is a matter of life and death, and there are moments when her piercing despair, usually bravely concealed, cuts to the quick."

Paul Taylor of The Independent: "Cattrall gives a very attractive and moving, if slightly too emphatic, performance. She eloquently expresses, through just her face and voice, all of Clare's moods--the barbed button-brightness; the sarcastic stand-up or propped-up funny-girl routines which radiate the continuing sharpness that puts the character in a Catch-22 position if you are clever and sane enough to mount a strong case for suicide, it shows you ought not to die; and the desperation of thwarted yearning, especially the humiliation of arousing kindly pity where once she would have aroused sexual desire… But Hall's production does contain some dreadfully over-insistent performances. And it can't disguise the fact that there's not enough texture or variation of atmosphere in this relentlessly talkative, admirably humane, and artistically not very distinguished drama."