This review was sent in by AntonyF and appeared in today's Daily Mail in the UK:
Star's trek into limbo
Review by Michael Coveney
Johnson Over Jordan (West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds)
Verdict: Stewart's star trek interrupted by terrestrial second
thoughts -- * (out of 5)
John Boynton Priestley, Bradford's greatest literary lion, who died
in 1984 would surely be delighted to know that Yorkshire are once
again County Cricket Champions - and that the West Yorkshire
Playhouse is reviving his 1939 'adventure in theatre', in which a
cosy, respectable Everyman figure, Robert Johnson, relives his life
at the very moment of death.
One of Ralph Richardson's most famous roles is taken by Patrick
Stewart, so you might suppose a journey into the intergalactic
unknown would be a doddle for the Star Trek veteran.
But the play is left hanging unconvincingly by director Jude Kelly as
a half-heartedly updated parable.
I fear she will do her campaign to succeed Trevor Nunn at the
National absolutely no good at all with this effort. It pales
pitifully in comparison with Stephen Daldry's re-invention of
Priestley's war-horse, An Inspector Calls.
Johnson, lying in pyjamas on his deathbed, is a downmarket Everyman,
a dull insurance clerk redesigning his own identity in a self-
indulgent wallow. His out-of-body experience leaves a photographic
image on the bed.
Stewart's face is projected, much enlarged, on a white brick wall.
That wall disintegrates as his pre-celestial adventure - and the
audience's purgatory - begins, with the hands of the other actors
breaking through. White spongy bricks get under everyone's feet for
the rest of the evening.
Johnson is hounded by insurance clerks and sucked into a dodgy
nightclub where, in a fantasy episode of absurdist excess, he seduces
his daughter and kills bis own son.
Unfortunately the production fails to enunciate any narrative point
to all this. Nor does it contain the ebb and flow, let alone rush, of
a supposed dream.
Stewart makes a thoroughly banal, unaccentuated exit to eternity
across a sea of black plastic while two unbelievably irritating lady
pianists continue the soporific musical doodling that undermines the
entire show.
The cuts and alterations remove Priestley's strict contrast between
pre-War sobriety and the effusive, already dated (in 1939)
Expressionism of the central episodes. And they misguidedly pander to
a modern sensibility with mention of 'going clubbing', homosexual
marriages and animal rights campaigns. False notes multiply over the
bum notes of the lady pianists.
Nor does Mr Stewart, whose classical RSC voice is still a great
asset, get anywhere near the ethereal, dotty starkness that Priestley
wrote, and that Richardson must have conveyed so well.
