Description
Book SynopsisAn Edinburgh International Festival production. The lobby of a grand hotel, New Year’s Eve. A snow storm rages. Minetti, a long-forgotten actor, arrives in great spirits to discuss his comeback as King Lear with a theatre director. While he waits patiently in the hotel lobby, Minetti’s obsessive personality reveals itself in a series of strange encounters with other guests. He rails against outrageous fortune and unfulfilled ambitions, often colliding with crowds of young hotel guests who frequently burst in to celebrate New Year’s Eve. As with King Lear, the storm which rages outside reflects his turbulent emotions until he finally finds peace and resolution.
Trade ReviewPeter Eyre, performing in a translation he has written with director Tom Cairns, supplies a mordant, tragic and poignant epitaph for an old actor who has truculently passed his sell-by date - Thomas Bernhard is commenting bitterly on the contemporary German theatre's obsession with reclaiming the classics at the cost of local new plays. * Four stars - Michael Coveney, What's On Stage *
[Minetti] - offered the real Minetti the comeback he was looking for, and gave the notoriously uncompromising Bernhard a chance to express some of his more trenchant opinions on art, theatre and stultifying provincial mores. * Three stars - Laura Barnett, Telegraph *
Gradually, as metaphorically the hours pass and the theatre director doesn't arrive, we become engaged in the agony of this character whose dreams of success have been shattered. * Four stars - Barbara Bryan, Edinburgh Guide *
