"...Peter Nichols' 1981 play is a companion piece to Pinter's far more forensic Betrayal. Its mileage is in the monkey business, the emotional cost, the getting caught, the damage done. James Laurenson plays a randy picture restorer James, Cherie Lunghi his wife Eleanor - so beautiful and intelligently performed that you simply can't believe the husband would cheat on her. But sure enough their marriage falls apart, thanks to some wanton crumpet in the form of a research student - Nicola Walker, all come-hither looks and skimpy dresses. Step forward the married couple's alter egos--expertly portrayed by Martin Jarvis and Cheryl Campbell who walk on and tell it like it really is. Two characters, four people on stage, one virtuoso idea that at its best rocks the house. Gillian Barge as the widower friend lends an acerbic presence to this cat's cradle of erotic longing, furtive booking and brutal, boozy recrimination... Compulsive viewing for those for whom suspicion is a way of life. For those still in love, I'm really not sure you need this." --The Express

"To call Peter Nichols a theatrical giant would be pushing it and stretching him, but Michael Grandage's rivetingly acted revival of his Passion Play makes me angry that he has not had the recognition he deserves. The piece appeared in 1981, between Pinter's Betrayal and Stoppard's Real Thing, and it, too, involves the intricacies of sex and adultery. But fine as both those works are, Passion Play has an intensity of feeling, a moral scope and a theatrical inventiveness neither matches... It isn't often a play combines emotional power with intellectual size. Passion Play does just that." --The Times "...Nichols has said that this piece is of the kind that is more difficult to perform than to write. But Grandage and his first-rate cast make the complicated cubism of the piece look deceptively easy and, more important, inevitable. The blocking and the interplay between the actors have an uninhibited physical fluency that removes any sense of distancing artificiality. Nichols's masterly dramaturgy is displayed in the mordant cross-cutting and collapsing of time... Trenchantly exposing the struggle between honesty and hypocrisy and the tragicomedy of self division, the doubling device springs continual surprises... The second half of Passion Play, which develops a slightly unconvincing feminism, is not as assured. Nichols tries to expand on the pun in the title, with James (who is restoring a painting of the crucified Christ) castigating Christianity as a life-hating religion that replaced natural group sex with the joyless married unit. But this metaphor stubbornly refuses to enter the bloodstream of the play." --The Independent "...Michael Grandage's fine production leaves little doubt that this bitterly funny, savagely honest play about adultery is a modern classic... What makes the play so riveting is that both James and Eleanor are played by two actors... The constant use of the alter egos creates the theatrical equivalent of cubism, so that we see the same events from a variety of emotional viewpoints. The effect in Grandage's thrillingly well-acted production is often funny, but it is also disconcertingly near the knuckle and deeply painful. Nichols lays bare the hypocrisy, and the ridiculousness, of men as if with a scalpel... This is a play that devastatingly nails the way a lot of men think a lot of the time. Lunghi and Campbell superbly capture the pain and gnawing misery of betrayal..." --The Daily Telegraph

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