Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The price of success

Plus: the Lyric Hammersmith's Things I Know to be True is fundamentally untrue

issue 20 January 2018

A pattern emerges. A hot American playwright, dripping with prestigious awards, is honoured in London with a transfer of their best-known work. And it turns out to be all right. Not bad. Nothing special. The latest wunderkind to wow London is Amy Herzog (five plays performed, six awards received), whose marital bust-up drama Belleville is set in a glamorously derelict corner of Paris.

Abby and Zack, both 28, are newlywed Americans trying to shore up the wreckage of their European gap year. Abby wanted to learn French but has stopped attending classes. Instead, she’s studying yoga although the lessons are regularly cancelled. And her acting career seems to have stalled. She’s still grieving for her deceased mum and fretting about her pregnant sister while indulging in long, needy conversations with her widowed dad. Her husband, Zack, is a bigger mess.

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