Hurts Given and Received: Postcards from the Gods review

A slightly mixed but entertaining review for the play from Andrew Haydon on his Postcards From The Gods blog. Read the full review on the blog.

It’s all pretty eventful and rolls along at a fine pace. As such it’s hugely diverting.

A lot of the things that the characters say to each other are quite funny or witty, and Tom Riley in particular has a hell of a way of making the part of Bach seem like Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet crossed with David Tennant’s Hamlet and his Katurian from The Pillowman all being played at once by Tom Hollander. As such, Riley does a phenomenal job of making the script sound like great, hugely, actable literature – on the other hand, he does so in a way that thanks to either his performance or Barker’s take on the world, stops short of being an actual person. It’s technically brilliant, but lacks anything deeper.