National Theatre Live: All About Eve

There are a lot of great actors involved in this production, and they're doing the best they can, but the conception of this piece is horrible, and the experience excruciating.

When you really sit down and listen to Joseph Mankiewicz's original script, you realize how heavy and pretentious it is. Luckily, in his direction of the original movie, he managed a lightness that made the piece sparkle.

But this adaptation takes the heaviness and just adds to it with pretension. First, there is terrible, intrusive score. Whatever comedy might have been achieved is flattened by an eternal, ominous drone that kills the actors' rhythms.

Then there is the video screen which again looms larger (literally and in attention) than the actors. The idea works best with Gillian Anderson's mirror POV, but it is just awful in the party sequence. The actors caught on camera look uncomfortable and like they're stuck in a scullery closet, but we end up watching them more than the actors on stage, and that's just bad theatre.

Watching Gillian Anderson do Bette Davis almost makes this production worth it, but only almost.