Sunday Express, 20 July 2003
by Mark Shenton

**Thanks, Bertilla, Catherine

The superb Kenneth Branagh gives (and shows) his all in his long-overdue return to the London stage this week. Playing the title role in David Mamet's 'Edmond', he is totally in command of a play about a man whose life is paradoxically spiralling rapidly out of control. As a 37-year-old who, in quick succession, leaves his wife and former life behind him and embarks on a brief but brutal journey through New York's underworld, Branagh's tour-de-force performance reveals an emotional nakedness even more shocking than the full-frontal one he gives when he visits a massage parlour.

In a chilly landscape of urban alienation in which everyone from pimps and prostitutes to cardsharps and pawn shops are trying to fleece him, he finds power by fighting back against a mugger and turns his fury on two women to whom he tries to reach out.

He verbally insults one on the subway; the other a waitress and aspiring actress with whom he goes home, he physically assaults.

Mamet's snapshot of this journey of self-destruction is grim and gruelling, with spare, terse dialogue and rapid changes of scene that unfold with a filmic fluidity.

Edward Hall's gripping production on the forestage of the National's Olivier in a design that mirrors the theatre's concrete architecture, is populated by more than double the number of actors than the nine who managed to do it when it was first seen in London in 1985 at the Royal Court.

Presented as part of the Travelex £10 season in which two-thirds of the seats are just a tenner, it remains a deeply unsettling play.