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An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
2012
Theatre
The show has suddenly become quite wonderful, and the galvanising factor is the terrific stage debut of Melanie C
Blood Brothers
Music
The British pop music industry may be eating itself but if Muse are the pick of what it can offer the world in 2010 then British music is in rude health indeed
Muse
I was smitten by both Gilberts enormous luxuriant moustache and the intelligence and nuance of this highly entertaining play
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Always been a fan but never seen them live. I was ecstatic to be part of this epic event. WOW!
London,
Nicholas de Jongh's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Ramin Gray.
Cast: Royal Court Theatre
Description: A moral drama by Max Frisch concerning the events after a fire, as a philanthropic man gives shelter to two strangers. Translated by Alistair Beaton.
Trains: Tube: Sloane Square 
Phone: 0207565 5000
Website: www.royalcourttheatre.com
Dinner party of the absurd: Will Keen (Biedermann), Zawe Ashton (Anna), Jacqueline Defferary (Babette) and Benedict Cumberbatch (Eisenring)
Take a black comedy that shades into the darker recesses of Theatre of the Absurd. Add in a prophetic chorus of helmeted Firemen who sound heavily schooled in classical Greek tragedy and TS Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral. You will then find yourself caught in the bracingly strange and sinister world of Max Frisch's The Arsonists, a mid-20th-century Absurdist play of timeless vitality.
Neatly updated to the present in Ramin Gray's production and couched in Alistair Beaton's fresh, felicitous translation, The Arsonists sets its critical sights on people too fearful to face glaring reality: Frisch took his negative inspiration from the appeasing Czech president who took into government Communists intent upon destroying the country's independence, lofty German intellectualsand Jews who would not believe Hitler was intent upon destroying them.
An allegory and parable is framed about bourgeois guilt and moral myopia. Frisch's prosperous crooked businessman, Will Keen's Mr Biedermann, knows the town is possessed by an epidemic of arsonists, who wheedle their way into homes on pretexts of needing a place to sleep.Yet he still allows an ingratiating ex-wrestler (the insufficiently pugilistic Paul Chahidi), who comes knocking at his opulent front door, to stay the night.
A fascinating helter-skelter ride into the realms of absurd drama and gallows humour begins. Schmidt , together with Benedict Cumberbatch's far too mild-mannered former waiter Eisenring, assemble oil drum, detonators and fuse-wire in the attic. Keen's modestly furious Biedermann cannot bring himself to tell a visiting policeman the terrible truth. "If I report them to the police I know I'll be making enemies of them," he later explains to his wife Babette, as he tries to justify himself.
This comic-absurd excuse characterises Biedermann's placatory, guilt-laden dealings with the fireraisers, right down to a grisly dinner party that serves as prelude to a literally explosive finale. Gray achieves a final, provocative coup when Munir Khairdin's intellectual arsonist, presumably a Muslim terrorist, breaks ranks with Schmidt and Eisenring, because they simply enjoy setting houses on fire.
Yet Gray's lethargic production played out on Anthony Ward's opulent white and perspex set, needs to convey a far stronger, climactic sense of anxiety, foreboding and panic. Keen's phlegmatic Biedermann and Jacqueline Defferary's subdued Babette are comically competent but must operate on a far higher emotional level to make this thrilling classic fully operational.
• Until 15 December. Information: 020 7565 5000.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
