The first cut is the deepest one

THE CUT
Donmar

THE Cut is a surgical incision made on the back of a political prisoner or dissident by an interrogator who combines cruel surgical skill with the habits of a fastidious bureacrat.
The play is written by Mark Ravenhill, whose first play Shopping and Fucking made audiences sit up as did Mother Claps Molly House. Here I’m afraid I must use the opposite of the current jargon – it is opaque not transparent.
Ian McKellen plays Paul, literally the instrument of the state whose job is to change the ways of the institution he has served so clinically. John (Jimmy Akingbola) demands to be given The Cut. Paul tries to convince him that all that is past procedure.
John wins the day and Paul obligingly cuts his back – a shocking rite of passage.
Paul goes home to middle-class respectability and his wife Susanne, Deborah Finlay, who spends her afternoons in bed and moans about her inarticulate servant.
Stephen, Tom Burke, has a son up at university campaigning against the use of The Cut. Susanne feels she must join his cause. This grim tale ends in a prison cell where Paul is doing time.
Stephen, now a functionary of a brave new world, visits his guilt-ridden father and craves no favours. Stephen looks uncannily like David Miliband, New Labour’s whizzkid from Primrose Hill. He leaves his father to go and usher in a better future with all the professional calm of an undertaker.
McKellen is a master of his craft and his collapse is memorable. Paul, a barren human being, is waiting for death and its peaceful resolution. Deborah Finlay has a chilling quality of a woman who has forgotten pity and is incapable of comforting her husband. She is as cruel as he was – as an obliging servant of the state.
Jimmy Akingbola has a natural authority which marks him out as someone to watch. Director Michael Grandage holds it all together but it scratches rather than stings.
April 1
020 7240 4882