Stage review: The Gods Weep, Hampstead

The Gods Weep, full of soaring feats of imagination and low-down skullduggery, is a demonically bonkers production that reveals, in all its excess and glory, what theatre can do when unleashed with its blood pumping hard.

There's a squirrel on a skewer, a rape, a crudely broken arm, a cut throat, a Shakespearean battle, a boardroom carve-up, a recovered cake, a string of expletives, an astrologer, loud bangs, executions and dollops of double crossing, a dissection of food security in the Third World, rain, blood, regurgitated porridge and a cat in a bag that, like Schrodinger's own, might or might not be dead.

It's all in there in Maria Aberg's unflinching take on Dennis Kelly's text. Don't stop to tick off the boxes because there'll be another thing in a minute. Don't rest your hands because you'll be hiding behind them soon enough, to block out a gruesome visual or stifle a laugh that might or might not be appropriate.

This orgy for the senses is not to everyone's taste. (A gaggle of shell-shocked seniors took advantage of the interval - two hours in - to make good their escape.) But once you find the rhythm, you can do nothing but admire the sheer full-on theatricality of this thrill ride.

The story, at least at the outset, makes sense. In a manner adopted by King Lear, Colme divides his business empire between two feuding boardroom rivals, Catherine and Richard, while flinging his son out into the corporate cold, claiming he's too nice to follow in his tyrannical father's footsteps.

While the two execs take advantage of Colme's impotence, the son seeks revenge and Colme spirals into a fugue state of pain, delusion and despair, nursed by Barbara, the unwitting daughter of a man he had ritually destroyed simply because he could.

In his fevered state, he imagines (or does he?) the boardroom battle as a physical, guerilla war that brings to the fore the provenance of this RSC production in an Act that is bizarrely reminiscent of a Fry and Laurie sketch.

(Two bloodied, gun-slinging soldiers share tea.
Old Soldier: What did you do before?
Martin: I was executive head of communications? You?
Old soldier: Financial advisor. Future and hedge funds.)

When all is done, we are alone with Colme and Barbara on a hillside under a tarp. Barbara coming to terms with the man she knows to be her father's tormentor, and Colme, now a burnt-out innocent, seeking redemption, shelter and makeshift lamb kebabs with equal levels of blank fervour.

All this - and there's a lot of it - all this is played out with straight-faced rigour and savagery that is entrancing and perplexing.

Jeremy Irons nails Colme. From slick-suited master of the universe to guileless, burnt-out hobo, his skill for nuance survives this blizzard of action to tell a touching and truthful tale.

Joanna Horton finds in Barbara that hard-edged, sentimentality of the beleaguered pram-faced princess that is an anchor point in a swirl of unravelling.

Jonathan Slinger as Richard, Helen Schlesinger as Catherine, Luke Norris as son Jimmy and Nikki Amuka-Bird as Beth, a victim of Jimmy's emotional machinations, are uniformly compelling in an RSC production that is gloriously flawed in its structure but played with such visceral conviction that the impact is enhanced, rather than reduced, by incredulity.

- The Gods Weep runs at Hampstead Theatre until April 3. Go to hampsteadtheatre.com

From March 31, 2010