This review was originally written for The Reviews Hub: https://www.thereviewshub.com/interview-riverside-studios-london/

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Lives slowly unravel as truths and confessions fly in this gripping stage adaptation of Theo Van Gogh’s film Interview.

This stage adaptation draws on the nucleus of the original film, propelling it into a more contemporary narrative. Robert Sean Leonard’s cast-aside political reporter Pierre finds himself begrudgingly at a plush New York apartment tasked with spotlighting Paten Hughes’ high-flying influencer Katya. Pierre’s desperation to be in Washington, amid an impending Vice-Presidential impeachment, instead sent to Katya’s apartment to be kept out of the way, fuels his resentment, not just of his situation, but of Katya too, whom he perceives as shallow and vacuous. What follows across a gripping 90 minutes is a powerful, pulsating power play between the two characters as Katya proves more insightful than Pierre had believed.

Paten Hughes’s completely unbreakable Katya is a fascinating and convincing performance. Upon first arrival, Katya’s personality is typical of what you would expect of a social media influencer, right up to the big sunglasses, ever-present ring light and designer bags. Yet Hughes’ complex delivery, combined with Van Der Sluijs’ writing, crafts a compelling character, where truth and fiction always seem on the cusp of converging. ‘It’s not real unless it’s on camera’, cries Katya, representational not just of her all-consuming online presence, but hinting at a darker evasion of truth that the play hints is consuming society today, and it is a sinister undercurrent that Hughes feeds neatly into this intoxicating performance.

In contrast to Hughes’ energetic Katya, Leonard’s enigmatic Pierre, as a journalist, claims to feast on truth, and Leonard does well to match Hughes’ energy in a more stoic way that enables the piece to continue moving at pace. Pierre is not without his skeletons, something Leonard keeps bubbling under the character nicely, though his sudden shift in personality initially feels a little jarring. Pierre’s cynicism at the world where truth is second to content is obvious from the beginning, with his initial bitterness towards Katya and her internet-centric life seemingly unfair, or is it?

Although strong individually, where this production thrives is in the intensely fraught back-and-forth between the two characters. The interchanging of the pair’s dialogue, rampant and rapid, creates a stifling atmosphere as Katya proves more than a match for the mercurial Pierre. Both Leonard and Hughes are tireless here, evoking a sparked intrigue as their interactions become more dangerously intertwined. Each of the pair strives to push the other’s buttons, resulting in a ferocious and shocking duologue and a final ten minutes that are packed with twists and turns for who leaves the interview with the upper hand.

This couples well with Derek McLane’s claustrophobic set design. At first, a deceptively spacious apartment, the action eventually boils down to a few square feet across a sofa, where insults and passions are quickly, provocatively, traded.  This, along with Ata Güner’s pulsating sound design, combines well to fuel the chaos between the two even further.

It is, though, at times, a little too obvious. Despite both characters revealing, or not revealing, truths about themselves, the production does encourage you to side a certain way by the end. In this sense, this obviousness deviates a little from the organic back-and-forth it otherwise generates. This too is compounded by the unsubtle video design placing stuffy news footage side by side with Katya’s colourful social feeds, a comment certainly of a societal shift, but something that does not really add too much to either character.

Nevertheless, Interview is a tense, fierce duologue that romps through its runtime without much fluff. The claustrophobic tussle between the pair, and their completely different worlds, collides at such a striking pace that this brutal, verbal bout leaves both seemingly metaphorically bruised from their encounter. A gripping power play between the pair, Katya tells Pierce she won’t ’forget this night’, and by the end, neither will those watching on.