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Precious is a new-style weepie but one that is much more bracing than depressing
Precious
Theatre
Ian McKellen is captivating throughout. He delights in the play’s gallows humour, yet is also maudlin and poignant
Waiting for Godot
Theatre
Slight quibbles notwithstanding, this will set the West End’s stock riding high
Enron
Utterly, utterly brilliant. You really are in for a treat
Though 'Trilogy' has won rave reviews, I personally found myself exasperated after about an hour
We went on a quiet sunday evening and the food was excellent, but the experience let down by the service and ambiance
London,
Henry Hitchings's rating
Reader rating
Description: Martin Crimp's contemporary adaptation of Ferdinand Bruckner's dark, erotic drama about the entangled relationships of six sociopathic medical students in Vienna in 1923.
Trains: Tube/BR: Waterloo 
Phone: 0207452 3000
Website: www.nationaltheatre.org.uk
Impressive: there are bright performances from Leo Bill as Petrell and Cara Horgan as Irene
“Being young is the one great adventure of our lives,” says one of the six medical students in Ferdinand Bruckner’s 1926 play. The adventure he has in mind is psychological, and the crazy entanglements Bruckner depicts call to mind an Iris Murdoch novel — or maybe an unusually complicated episode of Friends — though with a good deal more venom.
In a Viennese boarding house in the early 1920s, the characters grapple with desire, fickleness and each other’s wilful excesses. Narrowly avoiding the Scylla and Charybdis of suicide and bourgeois living, they conjure with bold ideas and sexual personae.
The students talk relentlessly about the difficulties of being young. “Everyone should shoot themselves at 17,” claims skittish Desiree, impressively realised by newcomer Lydia Wilson.
Bruckner’s play, presented here in a version by Martin Crimp, resounds with such spuriously epigrammatic lines: “Only women know how to help each other”, “Nature’s there to be made to conform to our wishes”, “Everyone needs an opportunity to visit the emotional toilet”. The portentousness is contagious, and Katie Mitchell’s quirky production combines jejune playfulness with a rather studied astringency.
Tellingly, the scene changes are more engaging than most of what happens in between. Amid stabs of bright light, figures who look as though they’ve parachuted in from Men in Black bag the props and unpack new ones. They appear to be collecting evidence or planting it, fleetingly creating the impression that the students are caught up in a sinister experiment.
More clear-cut are the bright performances from Leo Bill and Cara Horgan. Laura Elphinstone is rawly impassioned as the motherly Marie, and Geoffrey Streatfeild’s manipulative Freder is disturbing. Vicki Mortimer’s design suggests the blemished propriety of the boarding house and the music, much of it played live by Simon Allen, evokes the moonstruck modernism of Schoenberg.
But none of the characters is sympathetic and although the erotic charge has been extravagantly talked up, it is about as sexy as a cold hip bath.
Until 21 January (020 7452 3000).
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
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