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This area was sort of a shark tank for predators. Not just the Green River Killer, but.
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Oh my God. Hey, welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel. Or hello to you if you're listening to this review on podcast platforms. My name is Mickey Jo and I'm obsessed with all things theatre theatre. I'm a professional theatre critic here on social media and today I am bringing you my full review of the new London play Interview, currently playing at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith. We would call this an off West End Theatre, not an interview, not the Interview as I have been trying to call it, but simply Interview. It is based on a Dutch film from 2003 that was remade by Steve Buscemi, who also starred in it and directed it in 2007 and then again in 2021 in a Hindi language version, I believe. Now it a play on stage in London in a production that feels as though it might perhaps be better suited to downtown Off Broadway, but it is starring two American actors. Robert Shawn Leonard, known of course for his performances on screen in House as well as Dead Poets Society. I thought he was fantastic years ago in To Kill a Mockingbird at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre. He is joined by the rising star Peyton Hughes as they portray interviewer and interviewee respectively in a play about that particular power dynamic and its psychosexual implications. And there's lots to say about it. We're going to talk about the events of the play, we're going to talk about its themes, we're going to talk about these performances and as always alongside sharing my own thoughts, I would love to hear yours. If you have had a chance to see Interview on stage or perhaps if you're familiar with any of the film versions, please let us know what you think in the comments section down below. And if you enjoy listening to my review, make sure to subscribe to my theatre themed YouTube channel. Turn on notifications so YouTube lets you know every time I share a new video, whether it's a review or a theatrical news update, or go follow me on podcast platforms. In the meantime, here are my thoughts On Interview at Riverside Studios, what the notion of this story is is expanding on the inherently fascinating dynamic of an interview, which is something that as a media professional, I've had the opportunity to do now a few times. There is this strange sort of transactional intimacy to the dynamic that arises. Interviewer and interviewee. There's this unspoken anxiety about the way that their words are going to be interpreted and framed, which words will be used, the context in which they will be presented, and the way in which what they have said will be subsequently reported to the world and the implications that that can have for them, particularly if this is a big celebrity and even more particularly if it's on video, if it's live. We can all think of a handful of very recent occasions when celebrities have misspoken said something unfortunate in live TV or red carpet context and the publicist hasn't been able to intervene and, you know, reframe something slightly or request that something be excised from a final article. Because in the media age and the social media age, it's already out there. It's already being screenshotted and reacted to on TikTok, which is a world that interview in this version, in this latest stage adaptation delves into a little bit. But before I tell you about that, what the play is doing is it's taking that very unique and fascinating dynamic between two individuals and it's mining it for all of its theatrical possibilities in this increasingly frenetic and chaotic and dark and seductive evening that they share together. It is on the one hand a sort of a sensual power struggle, on the other a battle of wits. It's a chaotic two hander, basically. Robert Shawn Leonard plays a veteran journalist whose name is Pierre. Interestingly enough, given the same name in the original Dutch film as the actor who was portraying him, so is the young actress who he is assigned to interview, whose name is Katya. But in the original movie, and I believe the subsequent adaptations and remakes, she was just an actress, a soap actress, something that might be considered to be cheap, not of, you know, prestigious quality. And the way that that same idea and the sort of implicit disdain that he might have for the work that she does is communicated in this updated version of the narrative is that Katya is not just an actress, she is also a social media personality with seven figure Instagram following. And it is implied that she has parlayed that viral social media success as an influencer into a slightly less than legitimate acting career. One where she is making very commercial, very financially successful films that a lot of people, you know, millions of people are going to the cinema to go and watch, but not necessarily high art. And so, given that as the context of her career, we quickly come to understand the professional frustration experienced by Pierre Robert Sean Leonard's character when he is given this assignment. And it's something of a punishment from his editor as a result of recent transgressions that we come to learn about. Because he is not principally an entertainment writer writing these kinds of puff pieces, important though they may be to the newspaper, he is traditionally a political analyst, a field that he is being, at the time of the play, deliberately excluded from due to mistakes that he's made previously in his career. Though this comes as another frustration compounding how he feels about the situation. Because at this exact moment there is a big political shift unfolding because the then vice president, who is a fictional vice president within this production, is about to be impeached pursuant to an international political scandal involving undisclosed Russian connections and the use of bots and fake news and misinformation. And with the exception of one remark about Jeff Bezos having bought the paper that he is writing for, these are fictitious political figures in spite of any less than coincidental resemblance that they may have to real persons currently in office, though several aspects of it do ring true to the current political situation, particularly in which the US finds itself. There is one line that Robert Shawn Leonard has when he complains about the worst possible people he's talking about within the field of journalism, reporting on the worst people currently in the White House at the worst possible time, hence his annoyance, while this huge political moment is literally unfolding at being sent to Brooklyn to go and write a puff piece about this influencer turned actress, which, for what it's worth, is also very topical and very timely as there is more and more discussion about the way that Hollywood works in 2025 and the notion that studios are courting individuals with huge social media followings in order to guarantee bigger audiences for their films. Although the influencer ification of Hollywood is scarcely territory that the show really gets into, if I'm being honest, for the most part, the fairly combative conversation around Katya's influencer activity and her acting career tends to be the same kind of surf level arguments that we have heard before. And I was really eager for this to be a good faith exploration of influencer culture and that lifestyle, which in 2025 no longer looks like a small handful of really viral individuals who all look the same and who are all, you know, glamorous young women. All doing the same thing. It's become so widespread and so varied right now. Hell, I fall into that category as well. I don't really think that this was the authentic investigation into influencer culture I have been waiting for. I remain hopeful that we will see that play, but it wasn't this one. No, this one is more concerned about the power dynamic between these two characters. There is, to begin with, an extraordinary indifference on the part of Pierre, only compounded by the fact that he is forced to wait for over an hour because Katya is late in returning to her own apartment and is then on the phone when she lets him in, which he finds to be incredibly rude and is sort of symptomatic of the generational divide between them. He's very much old enough to be her father. And this plays into a little bit of daddy issues that emerges later in the play. I don't want to say that from a misogynistic standpoint, but it's absolutely what we're doing here. And if you don't believe me, for fear of issuing something of a spoiler alert, they do later end up embracing, dancing slowly around her apartment with him referring to himself as her father. There is also a cultural rift between them and the way in which they see the world. And if he has preconceptions about, you know, this being beneath him and not worth his time, and because of that, has not done sufficient homework, has not watched, watched the film that she is trying to promote, is not familiar with the TV series that she stars in, then she also, to a certain extent, has preoccupations going into the interview because she has a pre existing frustration about the way that she has been depicted in the press and the way that she has been characterized by particularly older white men and the way that she has engaged with them throughout her career, the way in which they refuse to let her have the final word and exert their power over her and deny her the opportunity to. To be seen and be heard. Something that social media allows her to do. Her hope in all of this is that she will finally be represented honestly and authentically. In an exclusive interview that she is offering, she tells Pierre, we all want to be seen, Pierre. Not followed, but seen. And if I'm being honest, remarkably little legitimate interviewing actually happens here. As she points out towards the end of the play, she asks him far more questions about his life than he does her. Even after he is scolded about the way that he is conducting the interview with a palpable disinterest. Much of it just devolves into verbal sparring between the two of them. She calls him out for not having watched any of the films. He criticizes her social media following and the way in which she represents the success of her career by pointing out how many people she brings to the cinema with her film releases. He tells her separately that reach doesn't equal worth and that mass doesn't equal merit, and she challenges him plenty in return, although strangely, when she suggests that she has provided 20,000 new readers for the article that is to be written for the interview, he seems impressed by this, despite his earlier statements. But at its core, the play follows one evening between these two individuals in a very particular power balance, entering into a whirlpool of arguments circling this inevitably intimate outcome, after which there can only be one winner. Let's carry on and expand a little bit on some of the themes of the play, some of the ideas that we are talking about, as well as the choices of this critic it.
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Of team so let me tell you about the creatives. This production has been adapted for the stage and directed by Turnkey van der Sluice, based on the screenplay by Theodore Holman and the film by Theo van Gogh with, as I mentioned, smart contemporary additions to an already interesting enough premise. It was quite familiar to me of the David Ives play Venus in Fur that is about a different relationship. It's about an audition between director and actress. You still have a power dynamic at play there, albeit a slightly different one. And the thing still devolves into a intimate power struggle. And I suppose had this found a way to focus more on the topics that it was discussing rather than just those sort of becoming superfluous and this just becoming about the dynamic and the relationship progressing between these two characters characters, then it wouldn't have felt so much like it wasn't covering any ground that Venus and Fur hadn't already. And it's particularly the political stuff, I think, that just doesn't really go anywhere. It is very present within the framing of the whole thing. He is talking about everything that is happening and then he continues to bring it up in the context of this interview. He asks at one point if he can watch the TV coverage as it's unfolding. She encourages him, when he is still reluctant to carry out the interview, to question her as if she was a senator and apply the same sort of tactics and approach, but with no real way of relating her character to that world. It's just very one sided and it doesn't really go anywhere. It only serves to furnish a little bit of his backstory as they begin to evoke dark secrets from each other in this final sort of manipulative psychological game. The one thing that I do think adds a lot is the social media of it all. Because while Pierre is still, you know, not necessarily deciding yet that he is going to continue the interview, Katja sort of obligates him to do so by going live on her social media and introducing him to the world and announcing a collaboration with the paper that he is writing for, the New York Courier. It's at this point when he says, what did you just do? That she tells him that she just afforded him 20,000 new readers. But it provides a very new and immediate and dangerous frontier upon which they can threaten each other when there is the possibility of exposure of secrets later on in a sort of mutually assured destruction that they acquire between themselves, as each promises the other to reveal something, something secret about their personal lives that nobody else in the world knows. And crucially, it provides legitimate means of retaliation for Katya should she be misrepresented in the piece that he is writing, for her to be able to discredit and, you know, cancel him on social media by broadcasting things that he said or frame him in a certain way. She finally has this opportunity for payback against the media. And we feel the distinct possibility of that through the way that the piece is directed through a lot of the projection work and videography, through the conveying of footage captured by a camcorder on stage or through a phone to projected images on the back wall of this set. It's all very Ivo Van Hove. The set, which I should point out, designed by Derek McLean, is this gorgeous Brooklyn loft. It's very bohemian. It's all exposed bricks and high ceilings and steel beams and a freestanding bathtub on that same back wall. In the establishing scenes of the play, we are also seeing screenshots and news headlines, lines and video grabs and Katya's social media, as well as comments that have been made about her on social media. And her initial entrance, interestingly, is framed with A cascade of sentences criticizing her, criticizing her feminism and criticizing her. Just like several personal attacks being leveled against her. We are predisposed in this way to understand the challenges that she faces as someone being very publicly scrutinized and empowered because of that, I guess to understand, understand more deeply the frustrations and disappointments that she has about the way she's presented by the world. Going into this interview though, again, she doesn't specifically invoke that in conversation. We don't get that deep. The video design is credited in the program to I don't love you anymore. All one word. Don't worry, that's the name of the, of the video designer. We're still fine. There's also a waveform projection in the moment when Pierre begins to record the conversation between the two of them. And a bunch of other helpful acknowledgments about when memory cards are swapped on cameras or which is crucial, as well as other phone conversations that are happening and laptop activity. Visually, it's all done very, very well. And the storytelling achieved through all of that is really terrific. Where I have a little bit more of an issue is in the use of sound. This has been composed and designed by a Taguna and generally it exists in one of two forms. We have this low, bassy, drone signaling intensity in a slightly heavy handed way. Or we have this plinky, plunky, sort of a lo fi, which if I'm being honest, just reminds me of playing Animal Crossing at night. Like, I know you want me to reflect on the fact that a little more understanding and emotional common ground is being found between these two very different people who initially disliked each other. But when you play this music in the background, I'm just thinking about stargazing with a Dalmatian. The video camera in this context, I'm feeling this in more and more contemporary pieces of theater. Sort of starts to feel like the modern day answer to Chekhov's gun. It is going to be used, it is going to capture something and that something is obviously going to be fateful. And in this context it really works because the thing that it does record ends up being weaponizable ammunition. And you know, the whole thing is a decent character study. I don't think it's entirely balanced in the way that they are depicted and the extent to which they are developed because we are immediately, from the way that it's framed, put in a position to be able to gain far more insight into his motivation. And she perhaps deliberately is very difficult for us to understand initially. We can grasp his growing fascination with her. The whole thing does feel quite male gaze driven, but it remains a little bit inexplicable that she should be so motivated to pursue him in the way that she does. There's comparatively little explanation offered into why she extends this interview and why she insists on him staying. There's an understanding of why she wants to gain the upper hand and what she wants this interview to be, and the scenarios that she concocts. But there are several moments amidst her clear disdain for this man where you don't understand why she doesn't just let him leave when he is perfectly willing to do so. And like I said before, we spiral around a lot of the same topics of conversation before eventually getting somewhere. It starts to feel a little bit absurd. And while any power struggle is interesting enough, we can do better than dialogue. Towards the end of the thing, after they've just spent this evening of back and forth conversation with each other in which he is saying to this actress, everything's just a performance to you. Or indeed those moments when the whole thing seems to boil down to too much alcohol and daddy issues. But since the whole thing is about these two characters and their shifting dynamic, let's talk about the performances of Robert, Shawn, Leonard and and Patent.
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Hughes so beginning then with Robert Sha Leonard as Pierre. He is very familiar of all of the journalists that I have ever met in my life, especially the later career journalists with this semi resentful fatigued quality, but also very conversationally pithy and with an evident enjoyment of his own turns of phrase. It's also a characteristic that we've seen in a handful of later Robert Shawn Lander performances in which he is discerning and just a touch sarcastic, but also very much over it. And we find out about some tragic personal and professional details in his backstory that offer insights into his cynicism and his distaste for the social media world and celebrity, and some of the notions which it propagates, particularly to young women, but also often some explanation as to his current stalling career trajectory. And one of the most interesting parallels between the two characters, though they express just so many differences, is their eagerness to define themselves and the way in which they express those things that they are not just wanting, but really craving. He repeatedly and eventually obsoletely refers to himself as a political writer, but also he corrects her when she calls him a reporter, though he later calls himself one without that being noticed. But she says reporter, and he clarifies journalist. And there is a quality of integrity and professionalism that he is trying to cling to here. That professional credibility seems to matter as much to him as her eagerness to be perceived and taken seriously and recognized and seen beyond the confines of her gender. He refers to her passingly as an actress. She corrects him, actor. But he also has flaws and shortcomings, and not just the professional transgressions that he later confides. But there is an ego there. When he laments not being in Washington to cover this particular political scandal, he says that he is the only one who can cover this story. He has the questions, and he is the only one who can ask those questions. He also has the kind of quirks that make this a very realized character performance. There is within the script this little interesting detail of a habit in which he hears a spoken line and then sings a song that would continue that line on. At one point, it prompts the two of them singing what Wonderwall? To each other, which serves as something of an icebreaker in their initially frosty encounter. Now, if the Wonderwall duet is the thing that breaks the ice between them, the power play that escalates this into a sort of emotional foreplay is when Katya sits on her little breakfast island and asks him to remove her boots. She is a young woman impatient to be taken seriously in the world with enough desire and agency, see, to feel fully realized and authentic, but just enough sort of young Mae west esque flirtation to feel written by a man, Peyton Hughes. At every moment throughout the play, though, even as she is shifting wildly between these different approaches and almost these different Personas, as she is switching gears and making calculated choices about how to control and navigate this situation. Situation. She makes her feel like a real human being throughout this and critically one who has experienced pain in spite of the. The charmed life that she may now be leading. There is a moment in which she replies to some of his commentary towards her. Better to be funny than to be the joke. She's also hugely empathetic. There is a moment when she is staring forwards and listening to a story that she has asked him to expand on, in which he is related to relating a dreadful personal tragedy that affected his family years before. And there is a restrained devastation bubbling behind her eyes. She's a very expressive performer as this outspoken and bold and fearless character, which is a really beneficial stylistic difference between the two actors because Robert Shawn Leonard's approach is a little more restrained and more conservative and more. More pensive. And she is abrupt and open and it really delivers that generational difference. A highlight moment comes when discussing her practicing with her acting coach. She displays several variations of on screen crying and the different kind of crying that she's been asked to do for different roles. And this being her skill set, her best talent even. And as well as offering just a little bit of dramatic foreshadowing as she sits in her window seat and throws herself forwards, crying in various details, different ways. It's also very funny. But the best moments of her character are also those which make the development of the dynamic between the two of them worthwhile as the focus of the play. Because it's fascinating to try and gain insight into the machinations of what she's deciding to do each time that it just slightly shifts and subtly escalates the detachment. When she asks, why did you lie to me? You told me you'd never seen any of my films. In response to him commenting about one of hers that he clearly had, she is coldly applying lip gloss. Later on when the interview seems to be stalling and we can perceive her sort of testing the boundaries and the confines of their relationship, pushing up against them and just exercising the possibilities of her seductive power. And even if the encounter between the two of them starts to feel an awful lot like playwriting and doesn't feel like the most honest exchange, they feel like utterly real people. And that's thanks in large part to these fantastic acting performances, which are also a huge part of the reason why you should go and check out interview for yourselves at Riverside Studios. It runs until 27th September 2025 here in London. I wouldn't be surprised if this went on to have some kind of an Off Broadway life. Although it arrives here amidst the sort of Off Broadway ification of a lot of Greater London theatres. Something that I've been noticing over the past couple of years. Recently in any case, those have been my thoughts about this particular play and as always, I would love to hear yours. If you have seen Interview, let us all what you thought of the play and its performances in the comments section down below. In the meantime, thank you for listening to my review. I hope that you enjoyed if you did and you want to stay up to date with all of my theater reviews, including West End and Broadway shows, make sure to subscribe right here on YouTube. Turn on those channel notifications so you don't miss any of my new videos or go follow me on podcast platforms. I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagey day. For 10 more seconds, I'm Mickey Jo Theatre. Oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a stagey day. Subscribe.
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Hey everyone, I'm Robert Mayes, host of the Athletic Football show and I'm excited to welcome you to the 2025 season and everything new we've got going at Tafs. First and foremost, get ready for a whole new look. We're coming to you from the Athletic Flight Football show studio in Chicago. Get the full experience by checking us out on our YouTube channel. Second, whether you watch on YouTube or listen to us on your podcast platform of choice, you'll hear a new voice. Dave Hellman joins Derek Klassen and myself as the third host on the show, bringing a different perspective to the conversation. Finally, Dane Brugler is back with year round NFL Draft coverage with Building the Beast. No matter what type of NFL fan you are, there's something for you on the Athletic Football Show. Join us Monday Through Friday on YouTube, Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
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