THEATRE REVIEW: Beat The Devil ★★★★

Beat The Devil
The Bridge Theatre, London

Thursday 27th August - Saturday 31st October 2020

The key to David  Hare's Beat The Devil is the fluidity of the piece from the text, which recounts Hares' experience with the Covid-19 disease, alongside Ralph Fiennes' exquisite performance which captures truth and a quite hefty amount of humour throughout, and continues to showcase Nicholas Hytner's role as a director, who most recently brought Alan Bennett's Talking Heads back to the public eye in the form of the BBC series airing over Lockdown, a remake from the original 80s series.

With Bunny Christie's set consisting off

 a large writing table and a few stationary props scattered on top to fill the background of a successfully established writing living with the illness at home, Hare's text is exactly what the world needs to hear right now, as the constant months of uncertainty and confusion put on display from our government is so effortlessly laid out bare in such a simplistic form within the piece, which runs parallel to the uprising in days that Hare himself was battling the Daemon inside of him.

Running at just 50 minutes, Fiennes' lifts the words off the page with such captivation, as we revert right back to March when Hare contracted the illness, and soon after are we hearing our prime minister's voice through Fiennes' vocals, and it's a pretty good impression in itself. Mixed together with Jon Clark's Lighting and Gareth Fry's Sound Design, the atmosphere shifts constantly throughout from warm glows to cold lights, as the piece veers towards a sombre tone at the climax of the piece.

Overall, Beat The Devil is a fresh piece of work that may seem too close to home given the immediate effect that we have encountered the past few months, but certainly delivers a powerful and personal detail of accounts from one of our greatest playwrights.