White Rabbit Red Rabbit - Soho Place

This is a hard show to write about because you don't want to tell the next performers of the play what's going on lol.

Some minor spoilers follow. . .

Jason Isaacs was fully committed to doing the show, in an "I'm the head prefect and let's get this done efficiently" sort of way. He improvised silly bits that could have been embarrassing with gusto and was funny during those bits. What he didn't commit to was giving the piece total respect and time to be thought about and absorbed, in particular the serious bits. He also imposed himself over the material at times, waving away bits that he took to be politically incorrect and dismissively letting us know he wasn't in to those bits lol. Frankly, I took his point in some of those bits (do you really point out "attractive" people in the audience? Do you point out "chubby" people?), but when he dismissed these bits, he made clear we were getting HIS voice not the author's. 3 stars from me.

Julie Hesmondhalgh made the piece work MUCH better. She played it as an entertainer and friend would, showing a lot of love to all the different audience members, and generally making everything very funny, just by being one of us, and by being very confident, uninhibited and humorous about it all. Seeing her, I felt was the ticket to maximum laughs and an overwhelmingly satisfying watch, though it was always as if she was ringmaster of the show, and it was an entertainment, so the serious bits did get short-shrifted, even though everyone came out smiling. She did inspire huge amounts of love and loyalty from the audience, and we did get a moment like the moment described in spoilers above, where a participant got very involved and had an interaction with a restraining usher. However, it was clear to us that the person was acting for all the right reasons and had simply been overcome by the content of the show. 4 stars from me.

Toby Jones was not an entertainer as such. He simply gave himself up entirely and disappeared into the material. He took much more time with each word and moment, inflecting each word with the intended import with which each word was written, reading it as if it all really mattered and his participation was simply incidental. Further, he treated the participating audience members as if they were stars, calling for each to get their due clap and giving them time. His respect for the material made it feel like the words were genuinely building to some important revelation, and unlike previously, this time I felt it did. There was one moment when he described the author's uncle and I found myself in tears because it was as if I was hearing the words for the first time, the import of them, and it was as if I was hearing it from the author of the piece himself with the authenticity of that. I could picture this very lost uncle as a real person, who I suddenly deeply cared about. But Jones also brought out the humour of the silly bits (designed to foreshadow the serious bits), perhaps not with as much deliberate humour as Hesmondhalgh, since Hesmondhalgh not only did the silly stuff but also added herself into the material as a funny ringmaster character who we could all laugh with and at. Ultimately though, Jones made me FEEL the piece, and I'd give his rendition 4 and a half stars.