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Notes From Underground Text by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Adapted by Harry Lloyd & Gerald Garutti Directed by Gerald Garutti Performed by Harry Lloyd Lighting design Bertrand Couderc | Set design Gerald Garutti Costume design Thibaut Welchlin | Sound design Bernard Valléry Photography Mirco Cosima Maglioca | Assistant directing Raphaël Joly Created in Paris in February 2014 at the Bains-Douches and the Atelier Delacroix Production C(h)aracteres Company The C(h)aracteres Company is in résidence at La Ferme des Jeux (Vaux-le-Pénil) It is supported by the Town of Vaux-le-Pénil, the Département Seine-et-Marne and the Région Île-de-France. C(h)aracteres | 9, rue Ambroise Pro 77000 Vaux-le-Pénil | www.characteres.com Contact: Laurent Letrillard | 06 03 69 76 15 | [email protected] Full Version on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/characteres/notesfromunderground Password: iamspiteful C(h)aracteres Notes From Underground 1 Summary The Times…………………………………………………………………………...p. 3. The Guardian………………………………………………………………………p. 4. London Evening Standard……………………………………………………....p. 8. BBC News………………………………………………………………………....p. 13. BBC Radio 2………………………………………………………………...........p. 16. The Arts Desk………………………………………………………………….….p. 17. The Week………………………………………………………………………….p. 19. What’s on Stage…………………………………………………………………p. 21. Time Out…………………………………………………………………………..p. 22. Harry Lloyd Daily………………………………………………………………..p. 23. Le Figaro…………………………………………………………………………..p. 24. Nominated for Best Male Harry Lloyd for Notes From Underground at the Print Room, Coronet C(h)aracteres Notes From Underground 2 Dominic Maxwell – October 10th, 2014 C(h)aracteres Notes From Underground 3 Michael Billington – October 9th 2014 Notes from Underground review – an ecstasy of self-loathing Print Room at the Coronet, London Harry Lloyd’s gripping portrayal of Dostoevsky’s antihero conjures manic verve and smouldering angst Harry Lloyd in Notes from Underground … vividly captures the storyteller’s humiliation. Photograph: Mirco Cosimo Maglioca Relocation is the theme. The Print Room, an adventurous fringe venue, has upped sticks and taken over a Victorian playhouse-turned-cinema in Notting Hill, west London. A five-year plan to renovate the building starts with the opening of a 100-seat, black-box studio; with characteristic boldness, the first show is an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s 1864 story,performed and co-written by Harry Lloyd, best known for playing Viserys Targaryen in Game of Thrones. As we enter, a darkly bearded Lloyd, squatting in a rotting armchair, greets us with a faintly diabolical smile. He launches into a ferocious monologue, revealing the unhappy state of an intelligent, neurotic, exasperated man who has abandoned the world and exists in a state of wilful solitude. The manic verve of Lloyd’s delivery is gripping, reminiscent of Kafka – not least when he talks of being an insect – and Beckett, in his evocation of hermetic despair. Of course, Dostoevsky influenced later writers. I still think it a mistake, however, for Lloyd and his co- adapter and director, Gerald Garutti, totransplant the story from 19th-century St Petersburg to 21st-century London. The action not only grows out of that particular Russian city (“the most abstract and premeditated city on earth” in the original), but Dostoevsky’s hero is raging against the social utopians who would turn him into an ant-like member of a mathematically perfect society. C(h)aracteres Notes From Underground 4 But even if the updating is gratuitous, Lloyd vividly captures the storyteller’s sense of stored-up humiliation; his recollection of how, at a school reunion, he was treated as a pariah reminds us of how unforgotten insults never die. And, although the hero’s encounter with a prostitute is the weakest part of the story, Lloyd renders it with an ecstasy of self-loathing. It all makes for an unnerving 70 minutes, full of smouldering angst, that suggests Lloyd is well-equipped to play the tormented antiheroes of world drama. C(h)aracteres Notes From Underground 5 Matt Trueman – October 8th 2014 Going underground: Game of Thrones’ Harry Lloyd does Dostoevsky Fresh from filming Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall for the BBC, the actor explains why he’s adapted the Russian author’s ‘scuzzy’ existentialist novella for the stage ‘A suitable intensity’ … Harry Lloyd in Notes from Underground. Photograph: Mirco Cosimo Maglioca “Is Underground a place or is he actually underground? Is it an adjective or a noun? Or is it ultimately just the depths of your mind?” Harry Lloyd is chewing over what exactly Fyodor Dostoevsky meant by the title of Notes from Underground, his 1864 novella, which the 30-year-old actor – best known as the short-lived Viserys Targaryen in Game of Thrones – has adapted for the stage. A fictional journal written by an angst-ridden young hermit, later nicknamed the Underground Man by literary critics, Dostoevsky’s book is often deemed the first piece of extistentialist fiction. Part manifesto, part memoir, it’s intense and rambling, recounting the reasons for one man’s complete withdrawal from society. “We can all go there on occasion,” says Lloyd. “The place where you just get wrapped up and twisted in your brain and you understand that, logically, there really is no point and no way out; the place where you are completely alone and can’t share anything.” You can see why Lloyd suits the part. He has the sort of intensity that makes our interview in Pret a Manger feel like plotting treason. He talks a million miles an hour in hushed tones, gesticulating as he goes, and peers out from beneath the baseball cap that’s disguising the Brother Cadfael haircut left over from filming Wolf Hall for the BBC. (He’s growing it out.) C(h)aracteres Notes From Underground 6 Harry Lloyd as Viserys Targaryen in Game of Thrones. Photograph: HBO/Everett/Rex Lloyd plays Harry Percy, Anne Boleyn’s foolish would-be lover, in the Mantel adaptations. Percy, an earl, isn’t his first titled toff either. The old Etonian has played two lords in as many years – Lord Riot, the ghostly founder of the Riot Club (screenplay by Laura Wade), and Lord Edmond Mortimer in Henry IV, part of the BBC’s Hollow Crown series. His CV is dotted with dukes, minor royals and that “pale, young gentleman” Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations. By contrast, it was the “dirty scuzz” of Dostoevsky that appealed. Lloyd was given the novella last Christmas by his brother (“Cousins, uncles, aunts – everyone got a copy”) and felt an immediate affinity with the Underground Man and, in particular, his sense of overwhelming inertia. That chimed with the actor – “Waiting for the phone to ring, unable to commit in case something else comes up” – but ran deeper, too. He points to the distractions of modern life, its billboards and e-missives, “things telling you what to do every second, signs telling you what you need. It can be very difficult to make decisions because of all the noise.” (A recent American staging had the Underground Man broadcasting via webcam.) Spurred on by the French director Gérald Garutti, with whom he’d worked at the RSC, Lloyd spent six days compiling a compressed draft from various translations. The pair rehearsed it in Paris at the start of the year, then presented it around the city: in a derelict nightclub, in Eugène Delacroix’s old studio. “It was mad: wonderfully bohemian and romantic.” What’s more, it has sparked a taste for writing. Lloyd has just finished shooting his own online sitcom, Supreme Tweeter, about an actor who gets followed on Twitter by Kim Jong-Un. The whole Underground experience, he says, has served to shake off his own inertia. “Doing the play turned out to be the cure for the very feeling that inspired it.” C(h)aracteres Notes From Underground 7 Henry Hitchings – October 9th 2014 Notes from Underground, Print Room - theatre review Here, in a one-man show he has created with French director Gerald Garutti, Harry Lloyd plays the Underground Man, a nihilistic maverick who has crept away from reality and lost himself in the dark recesses of his mind Dark recesses: Harry Lloyd in Notes from Underground / Pic: Alastair Muir Notting Hill Gate's Coronet cinema is the new home of The Print Room, a theatre previously tucked away on a side street off Westbourne Grove. Artistic director Anda Winters has big ambitions for the venue — eventually there will be three flexible spaces, one of which will maintain the site’s previous commitment to cinema. But for now there is a single 100-seat space, and this adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novella Notes from Underground launches it in fairly low-key fashion. It’s a vehicle for Harry Lloyd, probably best know for his TV work — scientist Paul Crosley in the current American series Manhattan, arrogant Viserys Targaryen in the first season of Game of Thrones. Here, in a one-man show he has created with French director Gerald Garutti, he plays the Underground Man, a nihilistic maverick who has crept away from reality and lost himself in the dark recesses of his mind. Tousled and wild-looking, he greets us as we enter the stark auditorium. At first he sits in a battered chair beneath a lamp, with his diary entries fanned out on the wall behind him. Piles C(h)aracteres Notes From Underground 8 of books lie at his feet. “I warn you — I am not a cheerful man,” he says, before wondering, “What do cultured people like to talk about?” The answer is “themselves”, and the Underground Man begins a confession that is obsessively self-absorbed. This reveals the corrosive nature of his intelligence — he’s always undercutting himself, indulging in verbal games and tying himself in knots. Lloyd savours the character’s conflicts and excesses. The Underground Man’s default setting involves deriving macabre pleasure from despair and jeering at anything that smacks of utopian thinking.

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