Andersen's English

The Telegraph“A flawed but intriguing play...” Niamh Cusack is genuinely moving in her anguish as Dickens’ wretched wife, Alastair Mavor touching as the pathetically inadequate son, but other roles are sketchily written and played in a piece that seems more interested in Dickens’ failings...

Guardian“Barry heightens the sense of Dickens' domestic cruelty...” Barry captures excellently Dickens' dynamic restlessness and the sense that his supposedly contented family life was one of his greatest fictions. The play also vividly conveys the cost of being closeted with a creative genius...

Time Out“There's little universality or urgency in this thesis of a play...” As new writing goes, 'Andersen's English' is the sort of quaint relic commonly assumed to be extinct outside of Richmond, where audiences apparently delight in ponderous, fusty dramas grown sepia-tinted with nostalgia...

The Independent“Max Stafford-Clark's quirky and compassionate production...” Sebastian Barry's subtle, speculative new play takes off from a sad yet amusing real-life circumstance. Barry's play picks up on the fact that Andersen was a weird kind of witness to this marital break-up...

The Observer“Sebastian Barry's new play is a traffic jam of notions...” The play evokes the selfish blindness of bleeding-heart geniuses and looks at what it is to be an outsider. Lisa Kerr's Irish maid is lively and Niamh Cusack's Mrs Dickens is lambent, but the insights are fewer than the possibilities floated...

Whatsonstage.com“There is no integration of characters or ideas...” The genesis of the project was a Broadway musical about the Danish writer for which Barry was hired to write a libretto. It never happened. Nor does the play, really...

Financial Times“A fascinating subject treated far less than fascinatingly...” Dickens himself, as presented by David Rintoul, is a figure of conflicting passions and passionlessness; so was the historical Dickens, but this does make it almost impossible to portray him credibly in any naturalistic drama...

this is london“Barry has braided too many ideas in the text...” This turns out to be a potent image of a play that is full of interest but lacks a solid emotional and narrative centre...

The Times“An arresting yet hostile portrait...” The play is, I suppose, an attempt to demystify the secular saint of 19th-century literature. But should it have left me feeling that poor Andersen was an insensitive fool to idolise him?...

The Stage“As Dickens, David Rintoul is splendidly flamboyant...” The overall impression is of a show which is a lot less than the sum of its parts...