Nathalie Barclay as Shani and Timothy O’Hara as George in Don’t Destroy Me★★★★☆Michael Hastings has the unenviable epitaph of being the “nearly man” of British theatre. Yet his astonishing output — ranging from his play about TS Eliot’s fractious marriage, Tom and Viv (later a film), to the Emmy-winning TV drama The Search for the Nile — revealed him to be as versatile as he was incisive. His first play, Don’t Destroy Me, was written in 1956 — the same year that John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger set the theatre world on fire — and announced him as another angry young man wanting to shred the system. Unlike Osborne, who was 27, Hastings was just 18 and a tailor’s apprentice, yet in Tricia Thorns’s punchily atmospheric revival we can see why his work’s raw

Source: The Times January 16, 2024 16:40 UTC