Cloaca, Kevin Spacey’s debut as the artistic director of the Old Vic, must rank as one of the biggest disappointments of the year. It isn’t bad, exactly, but I was expecting so much more from the man who electrified British theatergoers with his star turn in The Iceman Cometh six years ago. I sat there in the audience thinking, ‘He put his career in Hollywood on hold for this?’
A new play by a Dutch author called Maria Goos, Cloaca is reminiscent of Art, the long-running hit about three middle-aged male friends who argue about the value of a blank canvas. Cloaca features four middle-aged men, rather than three, and the target of its satire is avant-garde theatre rather than abstract expressionism, but, like Art, it’s a comedy that imagines it has something serious to say about male friendship.
As I say, Cloaca isn’t terrible.
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