I reviewed The Devil Inside Him in about 250 words for the latest issue of Buzz Magazine, out 1 June, but as part of the National Theatre Critics scheme I submitted a longer, more reflective piece on the play to my mentor Lyn Gardner, which I've posted below. Comments/criticism welcome.

I wonder what would have happened if Huw Prosser ever met Holden Caulfield. Huw being the main character of The Devil Inside Him, and Holden the mopey antihero of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye. They’re different, obviously – Holden the metropolitan protector of innocence, incapable of self-analysis; Huw the rural, tortured, self-absorbed writer. But they have a surprising amount in common: both lonely, tortured, sensitive, postwar adolescents, with an ambivalence towards their emerging maturity, very much at odds with the uncaring world they live in. Somehow, I can’t see them getting on. In the end, their meeting, say in a New York diner on a sunny Sunday afternoon, would be one of the most socially awkward in literary history, Holden making conversation about the ducks in Central Park, and Huw flinching every time the waitress brushes past.

It’s hard, though, to imagine that kind of meeting ever taking place – not so much because the two are fictional characters, but rather because Huw Prosser never really comes to life in The Devil Inside Him. The story follows his teenage years in a small town in Wales, where his love of literature and shy manner mark him out as a misfit in his community. He is bullied at school. His father is a god-fearing man with an icy manner who doesn’t understand Huw’s odd habits. He is hopelessly alone. And while the cast grasp Osborne’s play by the horns and turn in a series of striking performances, they just cannot make the tragedy that occurs tenable.

Iwan Rheon’s take on Huw Prosser, for instance, is feverish and enigmatic. He tumbles around the stage, a rabbit with myxamotosis, pupils like saucers, overcome with emotion at the very glimpse of another day. But even his best efforts can’t disguise a clumsy script that buckles under scrutiny and lurches tonally. Huw has a tendency to eulogise at length on the beauty of nature and the fragility of life, and in the nasal whine adopted by Iwan, this veers hopelessly into self-parody, driving the audience to bursts of laughter. Iwan does his best to rein in the melodrama, but faced with facile lines like “All I want is a little beauty in an ugly world” it’s hard for him not to sound daft.

The play is also indebted to a few of the conventions of the ‘loamshire’ play so reviled by the definitive critic of the time, Kenneth Tynan. Stock characters such as the garrulous daily Mrs Evans (Rachel Lumberg) crop up, and the latter half is crowbarred awkwardly into a murder mystery format.

When Tynan was defending Look Back In Anger, he pointed to the ‘blazing vitality’ of Jimmy Porter. How can a critic complain, he argued, in the face of ‘that rarest of dramatic phenomena, the act of original creation’. This is not a characteristic shared by Huw Prosser. He is not a fully formed, living, breathing creation in the way that Jimmy Porter is. He is a bundle of emotions, railing against society, an early draft of the rough beast of Jimmy Porter about to be loosed upon the world.

And yet, for these faults, there is a lot to love about The Devil Inside Him. The production has sought to lend the play a degree of depth that belies the naïve script. The staging is simple, atmospheric and effective, with an exhilarating closing scene. There are some electric moments: Mr Gruffuyd’s powerful sermons, Mrs Prosser’s closing words, and the startling exchange between the stricken Dilys and the clueless Iwan. It is difficult to level the play’s constant humiliation and vilification of women, something of a motif for Osborne, but in a wonderful turn as Mrs Prosser, Helen Griffin does her best. She plays the part with sensitivity and subtlety, demonstrating a quiet dignity at the heart of a bruised, downtrodden woman.

The Devil Inside Him is not the tale of teen angst and generational conflict that National Theatre Wales seem to have pitched it as, but this is far from a needless revival. It seethes and simmers with the explosive masculinity that became Osborne’s trademark once Look Back In Anger validated vituperation as a means of artistic self-expression. It is a glimpse of the storm brewing.