Did London Critics Cheer the Revival of The Night of the Iguana?

American actor Woody Harrelson is back on the West End stage. This time around he is starring in a revival of Tennessee Williams' The Night of the Iguana, also featuring Clare Higgins and Jenny Seagrove, at the Lyric Theatre. Did critics cheer the production?

Here is a sampling of what they had to say:

Matt Wolf of Variety: "First-timers to this thorny if most temperate of Williams plays may resist the show's longueurs, but those alive to its singular humanity will find much to savor… [Harrelson] makes something bitterly funny out of Shannon's adversarial relationship with the busload of traveling schoolteachers ready to have his head. And though the final preview saw him fumbling for the occasional line, the part marks a stretch Harrelson more than meets, his gift for improv helping him through some awkward stage business with a recalcitrant hammock."

Benedict Nightingale of The London Times: "Richard Burton played the role in the movie, spilling dark sexuality and sullen danger from the screen. Harrelson can't match that and, in the first half, seems little more than flustered and exhausted. It's hard to believe he's on the brink of a nervous breakdown, or that he's been accused by the Baptist ladies he's bussing round Mexico of seducing the youngest among them. When he tells this 16-year-old, 'can't you see, I'm almost out of my mind,' he doesn't exude the panic, the desperation, the horror of what he calls his inner 'spooks.' But Harrelson finds more intensity in Act Two. And much else is right with Anthony Page's revival, especially Clare Higgins as the American widow who runs this last-chance hotel."

Nicholas de Jongh of The Evening Standard: "[Woody Harrelson and Clare Higgins] give a terrific shot in the vitals to Tennessee Williams's The Night Of The Iguana… The last significant drama Williams wrote before he drifted into creative bits and pieces during his long decline, remains too often trapped in loquacious inertia, bleakly humorous, but without the impetus of action. Director Anthony Page has created an intelligent new version of Iguana, culled from the English and American texts, but his lucid production, with Antony Ward's lushly verdant set and Mark Henderson's lighting, barely conjures up the atmosphere of romantic lyricism that Williams envisaged. The emotional force and bravado of Harrelson's acting, as his Shannon cracks and crumbles, and Higgins's earthy broad Maxine Faulk in full flow, distract you from Iguana's structural limitations."

Michael Billington of The Guardian: "Woody Harrelson also invests Shannon with a mixture of self-loathing, religious despair and muscular puritanism that makes sense of the character's contradictions… But Page's production lays on the atmosphere without giving the play much inner momentum. Fortunately Clare Higgins is on hand to lend the rapacious hotelier a life-loving sensuality and Nichola McAuliffe offers an amusing sketch of a strident Texan Baptist who, having given Shannon an almighty thwack, proceeds to primp her hair. But, as a production, it has little of the drive of Richard Eyre's at the National in 1992. And one is left with rather too long a time in which to savour Williams's affinity with life's solitary victims."

Charles Spencer of The Telegraph: "There are flaws here. As so often, the writing seems overripe sometimes though less so here in the stripped-down two-act 'actors' version,' receiving its first British performance, than in the published three-act text, and he sometimes lays on the symbolism, and the poetic effects, with a trowel. But there is so much here that is wild and brave, heartfelt and savagely funny, that it would take a peculiarly desiccated heart not to thrill to Williams's scorching emotional honesty… On the first night, Anthony Page's production felt undercooked. There are plenty of good things here, but the ingredients somehow don't combine into a fully nourishing dramatic whole… Harrelson's turbulent priest has all the required nervous tics of a man sliding into breakdown, most notably the itchy movements, violent mood swings and a fast, garbled delivery that is suddenly interrupted by disconcerting pauses. Technically, it's a fine achievement, but I never felt that the actor had dug deep inside himself and that the performance had been dragged out of his heart and his guts."

Paul Taylor of The Independent: "Harrelson makes a strong impression as a man nursing a fever and tormented by paranoid inner demons. Jittery and intense, he's excellent at the reckless end-of-the-tether humour of this character and finely suggests that rejecting the narrow Old Testament God has not diminished his missionary drive… He's also adroitly captures the edge of indulgent self-dramatisation in Shannon. As he thrashes around tied to the hammock, Hannah notes that his seems a luxurious crucifixion - no nails, no blood, no death… A luminous goodness radiates from Jenny Seagrove's compelling performance, but she also lets you see the refined, dryly humorous hustler, forced to live by her perceptive assessment of strangers."