“Any movie that is commercialised is necessarily a piece of shit”
Having had my fingers burned by Zach Braff, I steered clear of Matthew Perry, but the lure of Olivier-award-winning (for Beautiful) and 3-time fosterIAN award nominee Katie Brayben suckered me in for Jesse Eisenberg (combined with not having to pay for the ticket hehe, hurrah for other people’s poor planning). The West End clearly has a tradition of proving a (too-welcoming) home for US actors with self-penned plays to put on and the latest to try their luck here is Eisenberg with The Spoils.
In some ways it’s an unfair comparison, Braff and Perry were first-time playwrights and the air of vanity project was thus hard to shake off; The Spoils is Eisenberg’s third play so he’s at least a bit more committed to the cause. That said, for me, on this evidence I’d rate him much more as a actor than as a writer. At the heart of the play is the anti-heroic Ben (played by himself, natch), a gift of a role in terms of its compelling awfulness but ultimately a frustrating character to watch as there’s little more to him than this one note. Continue reading “Review: The Spoils, Trafalgar Studios”
