A new production of Wallace Shawn's Fever starring Tobias Menzies is a hit with UK critics. Menzies, best known for recent roles in Game of Thrones, Rome and An Honourable Woman, performs the monologue in a suite at the May Fair hotel, London.
Fever, by New York playwright and actor Shawn, was first performed for small groups in private homes in 1990. This new production, directed by Robert Icke for the Almeida Theatre, invites an audience of 25 per show to a hotel room where Menzies plays a man suffering from a fever and a crisis of conscience in a luxury hotel suite in an unnamed third world country.
Dominic Cavendish in the Daily Telegraph says: "We're so busy talking, helping ourselves to the courtesy glasses of wine, dipping into the bowl of chocolates, taking in the luxurious trappings of this five-star hotel... that it takes a while to register that the performance has begun." The smartest thing director Icke has done is casting Menzies, says Cavendish. Menzies has "the sort of looks and charm that would hold your gaze even if he were standing on a soap-box at Hyde Park Corner".
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Indeed, Menzies is "fluid, vivid but restrained", says Dominic Maxwell it The Times. "His soft touch in this setting makes for a poetical, economical, bleakly witty and self-aware exploration of luck, money and the limits of empathy." The audience are "like arthouse veal calves, being fattened up for this takedown".
The ironic aptness of environment helps, says The Independent's Paul Taylor. "The verbal attack on exclusivity unfolds, discomfitingly, in an exclusive environment, with glasses of wine and bowls of posh chocolates laid out for the punters." But while Shawn's monologue has been attacked in the past as a chic stunt, this production, says Taylor, is "more reminiscent of King Lear than a Marxist sermon".
Maybe that's the problem, says Lyn Gardner in The Guardian. "Shawn makes the point that crying at The Cherry Orchard changes nothing... [and] you could say the same about his work, which has been performed for 25 years without sparking revolution."
But maybe change begins with the self, admits Billington. "Perhaps, as we walk back down Piccadilly, we will feel rage that some people in the world's fifth richest country still live on the streets. Maybe we'll do something about it, too." Fever runs until 7 February.
