'The Royal Shakespeare Company's admirable Gunpowder Season throws up another politically charged piece, glinting with implicit contemporary application, in the shape of Josie Rourke's powerful and atmospheric staging of Phillip Massinger's Believe What You Will...a glaring, messianic William Houston...in a production full of simply but sensuously evoked locations, Peter de Jersey brings just the right kind of experience-scarred charisma to the central role.'
INDEPENDENT
'The RSC's ambitious season of neglected plays from the age of Shakespeare...continues in fine style with Believe What You Will...a splendidly cold, cruel and vulpine William Houston...Rourke's production...is both splendidly acted and blessed with great lucidity...as well as Houston's flesh-creeping Flaminius (his mirthless smile is especially chilling) there is an outstanding performance from Peter de Jersey as Antiochus...he movingly captures the character's stoicism under torture, and also suggests the guilt he feels about causing so many deaths in the rebellion that first led him into exile...among a strong supporting cast there is delightful comic relief from Barry Stanton as a Falstaffian flamen (or priest) who cracks jokes about his huge girth and pungent sweat all the way to the scaffold...'
DAILY TELEGRAPH
'Josie Rourke's excellent revival...William Houston invests Flaminius with the appropriate mixture of authority and cunning: he has a lethal smile that seems dangerously out of sync with his ice-pick stare...Houston also embodies the innate nervousness of an ancient superpower prepared to use torture, trade sanctions, planted falsehoods and sexual temptation as a means of crushing a potential threat to security...Rourke and her designer, Stephen Brimson Lewis, astutely use a mix of antique-Asian and Caroline costumes rather than putting the play in modern dress...Peter de Jersey brings out admirably Antiochus' battered fortitude...there is good support from Jonjo O'Neill as a pliable Bithynian king dwelling in a sunlit world of tasselled parasols.'
GUARDIAN
'Time and again in Josie Rourke's sparklingly clear production, startling modern resonances leap out of the text...absorbing...Rourke's direction has an intelligent elegance...Peter de Jersey's battle-scarred, dignified Antiochus and William Houston's silkily villainous, ambitious Flaminius...a fine performance from Barry Stanton as a corpulent priest who goes to the gallows with a defiant jest in his mouth.'
TIMES
