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On Venue

 

"If you froze the action at any point, you would have a stunning picture. But it remains a fundamentally static piece. [...] Mr Prowse … is expert at handling Wilde, Coward and O’Neill. But his White Devil at the National wastes good actors and is marked by a strenuous dullness that comes from treating Webster’s sinewy text as if it were simply a set of captions to illustrate tableaux of death."
Michael Billington, ‘Devil with both feet in the grave’, The Guardian,
20 June 1991

                                                                 

"The cavernous Olivier is unsuitable for this tight, suffocating drama. [...] Unfortunately [the set and props] also suggest that director/designer Philip Prowse has made a desperate attempt to dress up and disguise the flaws in his empty, unintelligible production. At no time during the performance is there a sense of a company of actors working together, there is neither unity of movement nor unity of speech. [...] The actors lack direction and cohesion. Is it as if they have been plonked in the midst of the admittedly sumptuous set and told where to stand and what to say, but not how or why to say it." 
Catherine Cain, 'Look at the expense of meaning', St Herts & Watford Observer, 21 June 1991