Anthony Letterese

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It’s had very good reviews and is written by one of the most important playwrights on the 20th century. And yet I left feeling unimpressed. I liked the simplicity of the set and I thought Dominic West was good, but everything smacked of am dram melodrama. I assume I missed the point - it’s a celebrated play therefore I accept I may be in the minority of people who didn’t get it, although I did overhear others on departure making similar comments. It’s a story about an immigrant who falls for a gal and the gal’s uncle doesn’t like it. I’m sorry to say I just found it banal. Did this great playwright wake up one morning and think I know I’ll write a piece about an Italian immigrant to falls for an American girl. Bravo … but is that it? Nothing more? What was there to learn from this piece? Was there any kind of social commentary, any insight? I wondered if perhaps the subject matter was of its time and maybe didn’t have the same relevance in 2024. But if it does have relevance I can’t work it out. Love stories, even tragic love stories can be engrossing; the human condition is by its nature engrossing but this was largely dull.

Compelling, visually intriguing, exciting, fast paced and innovative. It has all the right credentials, apart from the inane and unnecessary violence. I don’t give a jot for all the reviews that say it’s a clever commentary on society today. It is not. It is a show that does nothing other than glorify death for no reason whatsoever. Any clever commentary could have been communicated without the need for death. And worse the volume of people who are raving about it. What does that say about our society? That so many are utterly unaffected by such gratuitous murder - that it’s justifiable? That their lives were of no value and expendable just because they were financially ruined? I didn’t get what moral this show was trying to teach me, but surely there has to be some deeper truth to justify such macabre storytelling. I watched one episode and that was enough. Shame on you Netflix for peddling such brutality.