Lindsay Lohan earned respectable reviews Thursday on the opening night of her stage debut, a West End revival of David Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow.”
Newspaper theater critics at both the 28-year-old The Independent and the more than 150-year-old broadsheet The Daily Telegraph gave the play 3 out of 5 stars. The latter’s Dominic Cavendish said, “The doomsayers, the mockers and those quick to . . . [complain] on Twitter can go hang” since Lohan displayed “a surprising — and smoldering — degree of style.” In the small but pivotal role of Karen, a movie producer’s temporary secretary with a mysterious agenda, “she delivers enough of the goods . . . [that she can] hold her head up high.”
Paul Taylor of The Independent praised her “deftly delineated characterization. . . . [S]he has real presence as a gauche, husky-voiced operator who keeps you guessing as to how far she goes around using her idealistic naivete and wide-eyed questions . . . as a stalking horse for naked ambition.”
The Telegraph and the tabloid Daily Mirror both noted Lohan needed a prompt for one line. “But showing she’s a true professional,” wrote the Mirror, “the redhead pulled it back to complete a successful performance in front of an audience of critics. . . . Yes, at points she seemed a little overenthusiastic, but she did it. And while at first her desperation not to mess up was almost tangible, with the help of the leading men she eased into it.”
The Independent said fellow stars Richard Schiff and Nigel Lindsay “are in fine, darkly frisky form,” yet ultimately called the production, a “good but by no means a great night out.” The Telegraph, calling the play “workaday but watchable,” conceded, “Yes, [Lohan’s] flat delivery needs more work, but so does the rest of the show.”
