RUSSELL TOVEY - No.1319

A slur on Russell Tovey’s professionalism

smithalistair: Review in which critic Tim Walker tries to sound clever while mocking three people for being overweight. telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatr… HT @scottm

scottm: @smithalistair You forgot "and slurs @russelltovey's professionalism, as if fat people on front row would affect his onstage performance"

JoCaird: @smithalistair @scottm Mocks three colleauges in fact. People who he presumably chats to at interval, having scrawled mean things about them

smithalistair: @JoCaird @scottm I don't think anyone talks to Tim Walker in the interval.

davidharrisonbn: Whatever you do, please ignore this miserable, depth-plumbing review of a really well-written, finely acted play. telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatr…

smithalistair: @davidharrisonbn I find it incomprehensible that he gets paid to write this rubbish.

By

Hugh Muir

guardian.co.uk, Monday 13 February 2012

Does one detect stirrings of compassion among our theatre critics? Poor old Russell Tovey, writes the Sunday Telegraph's Tim Walker. The actor has to get it on with Jaime Winstone in Sex With a Stranger at the Trafalgar Studios. And on the night in question, Tovey had to perform, as it were, with three distracting figures seated just a few feet away in the front row. "It occurred to me that if this grizzly trio didn't prove a passion killer for Tovey, nothing would," wrote Walker. "Rubenesque", was how he described them. Genuine concern, or just another swipe at fellow critics Ian Shuttleworth of the Financial Times and Paul Taylor of the Independent, both of whom were indeed close up, monitoring the action? From our vantage point at the back of the stalls, it's hard to know.

Sex with a Stranger, at Trafalgar Studios, Seven magazine review

By

Tim Walker 10 Feb 2012

Russell Tovey and Jaime Winstone do their best, but Sex with a Stranger is far from satisfying

At the first night of Sex With a Stranger, three of the capital’s more Rubenesque theatre critics were sprawled in the front row, barely three feet away from Russell Tovey as he tried to have his wicked way with Jaime Winstone.

It occurred to me that if this grizzly trio didn’t prove a passion killer for Tovey, nothing would.

Still, even with the cold weather, the young actor managed to grope Ray Winstone’s girl with a commendable degree of professionalism. The youthful pair play Adam and Grace, who meet at a nightclub and decide to get physical. The only problem is that Adam has a girlfriend named Ruth (Naomi Sheldon), of whom he has recently been tiring.

There is nothing about the staging of Stefan Golaszewski’s play to prove remotely distracting to the dirty mack brigade, and, with stories about love triangles scarcely a novelty, it’s rather hard to see the point of it all.