Riverside Studios

A war correspondent and an influencer-turned-actress walk into a New York apartment. What could possibly go wrong? In Interview, based on the 2003 Dutch film and 2007 Sienna Miller-Steve Buscemi remake of the same name, the answer is… a lot. She is Katya (Paten Hughes), the apparently air-headed ingénue with hidden depths and wicked wit. He is Pierre (House star Robert Sean Leonard), the jaded journalist, furious to have been dragged from his political patch – on the eve of the vice-president’s impeachment, no less! – to write a ‘fuckin’ puff piece’ about an influencer. Pierre spits out that last word, his voice dripping with contempt. He has no respect for Katya, and she has none for him. Let the cat-and-mouse games begin. Unfortunately, Interview fails to live up to its spicy sell. You can imagine the show that director and writer Teunkie Van Der Sluijs wanted to make: a fast-paced two-hander with an electric back-and-forth between Leonard and Hughes, where it’s never quite clear who has the upper hand and erotic tension simmers. Yet the script is clunky and the dialogue full of non-sequitors. Laugh lines that don’t land, and serious moments (like when Katya tells Pierre his mouth ‘tastes of Scotch and failure’) are unintentionally humorous. The performances, meanwhile, feel underrehearsed. Leonard and Hughes never truly get into each other’s rhythms, amounting to a dynamic that is intriguing in premise but in practice I couldn’t buy.  It’s a shame because, having...

The years have done little to dim Douglas Adams’s genius sci-fi comedy The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. But it’s been a while since there any sort of major adaptation of the intergalactic adventures of hapless last surviving human Arthur Dent and his eccentric alien pals: a big budget 2005 film adaptation was too Americanised and didn’t really work; a proposed Hulu TV series failed to materialise, possibly due to the pandemic.  This stage adaptation isn’t going to have quite the same reach, but it is, nonethless, an admirably ambitious sounding work of immersive theatre that will take over Riverside Studios’ Studio 2, Studio 3 and points inbetween. It’s created by Arvind Ethan David, a writer-producer who has previous with Adams’s work: he first adapted Adams’s other big book series Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency for stage as an 18-year-old. He ended up working for Adams for a spell, and would go on to adapt the books into another play, and a successful TV series.  An immersive Hitchhiker’s Guide is a slightly nerve-wracking proposition: there is the worry new content or even in character improv will be added to Adams’ essentially perfect creation. But done right, it could be out of this world. There are between three and six start times per day – see official website for full details.