‘Mad House’ Review: David Harbour, Bill Pullman Make Theresa Rebeck’s Chaotic Melodrama Seem Better Than It Is
variety.comDavid Benedict Jessica Lange was once asked if there couldn’t have been someone on the set of the painfully overwrought Southern gothic movie, Beth Henley’s “Crimes of the Heart,” who could have got everyone to tone things down, to which she giggled, “You mean, like the Taste Patrol?” Large stretches of Theresa Rebeck’s new, wildly dysfunctional family drama “Mad House,” now running on the West End, suggest that the Patrol has been similarly missing in action.You can see why actors of the caliber of David Harbour and Bill Pullman — plus equally gifted British talents Akiya Henry and Sinéad Matthews — wanted to appear in this world premiere.
Rebeck has barely been produced in the U.K., but it’s immediately clear she knows how to whip up bitterly comic set-pieces for actors to sink their teeth into.
But she has come up with a clutch of juicy, smart-mouthed roles rather than making them cohere into anything with true resonance beyond the melodramatic twists and turns of a secondhand family plot.
With three siblings fighting it out over a house and their inheritance as the exasperating patriarch slides downhill, the set-up dates back to “King Lear.” Here, it’s relocated to a falling-down family home in the middle of not-quite-nowhere on a property which, of course, turns out to be ripe for redevelopment — a fact conveniently unnoticed by its current inhabitants.
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