Quartet (Harwood) - Critical Reaction

Critical Reaction

Writing for The Independent, Paul Taylor described the play as “an unashamed — no, shameless — vehicle for four feisty old troupers whose task is to make us laugh a little, sigh a little and cry a little as they take us into the bittersweet world of facing up to age and mortality.”

Charles Spencer for the Daily Telegraph wrote: "...the show's heart is in the right place and a cherishable company of senior thesps give it everything they’ve got, breathing vitality into a script that could be an inert embarrassment if performed by less accomplished players."

Reviewing the play for The Spectator, Sheridan Morley concluded: "Harwood seems to have set out with something sad to say about the ravages of age on a profession which largely depends on staying young, but then to have been sidetracked into a sort of Three Tenors concert celebration without the Three Tenors. So his play doesn’t end, it just stops, and we are left with nothing more than the memory of four performances desperately trying to make bricks despite a distinct lack of straw; if Harwood has anything new to tell us about singers who have for different reasons lost their voices and yet are now going unquietly into that good night he seems, like his characters, to have abruptly and irretrievably forgotten what he was going to say. And the rest is a kind of silence."