[A] bruising, brilliant play
Evening Standard
An exceptionally talented and fast-rising writer . . . While incorporating elements from gaming, mafia thrillers and sci-fi, McDowall's dialogue manages to be arrestingly idiosyncratic and unpredictable. The atmosphere of apocalyptic menace is also shot through with flashes of irresistibly cheeky comic relief. Still only in his twenties, this writer is surely ... Read moregoing places. Whatever he dreams up next, his name will almost certainly be in lights at the Royal Court soon, if not at the National Theatre.
The Times
An unnerving mix of urban nightmare and sci-fi thriller . . . undeniably gripping
Guardian
A fierce dystopian drama with terrific comic edge. It flashes from casual naturalism to gory horror, from game playing to terrible earnest, form the vatic to the casual . . . McDowall is a grim wit who makes naturalism and surrealism look like best friends.
Observer
[A] brilliantly creepy and compelling new work by acclaimed young dramatist, Alistair McDowall . . . I greatly look forward to seeing McDowall's next work.
Independent
Alistair McDowall's thrilling, jizz-stained, genre-literate play is a grimy, geeky hymn to the things beneath our feet, the things in our society we teach ourselves not to see, the monsters that lurk in the shadows. Crammed with ideas and rich with cultural references . . . McDowall writes incredibly memorable monologues and the play's time-hopping structure is pleasingly intricate, its riffing on complicity and visibility smart and assured.
The Stage
This gripping and deeply unsettling tale of inner-city lowlife is a sensory and dramatic triumph
What's On Stage
There isn't another play quite like "Pomona." Alistair McDowall is one of a batch of young British writers chucking dramatic form up against the wall. His debut, "Brilliant Adventures," put a functioning time machine into a gritty housing-project drama. "Pomona" is even more ambitious: a science fiction thriller that bleeds into reality and back again. . . . beneath the gloss, the play's a sharp critique of the way we turn horrible realities into stories, and then turn a blind eye. . . . This is singular stuff: fresh, vivid and engrossing, and as delirious as it is dead serious.
Variety
Alistair McDowell’s brilliantly imaginative dystopian thriller . . . A cleverly constructed and slickly staged psycho-drama for the digital age . . . a pulsating ride.
Londonist
an extraordinary cocktail of brutal thriller, sweary magical realism and HP Lovecraft references . . . extraordinary and virtuosic . . . entirely gripping . . . a story about stories, underpinned by one, ominous line: 'everything bad is real'.
Time Out London
Alistair McDowall mixes myth with urban horror and black with in a way you see in the pages of a graphic novel more often than on the stage. . . . a striking vision of a dystopian Manchester. . . . Pomona shows a young writer with huge potential. . . . McDowall's canny dialogue grounds all his grimness in gabby talk of McNuggets and trainers and Indiana Jones; the dreamlike dovetails with the everyday. Pomona shows a writer working hard to go somewhere new.
The Times
It takes quite some creative brio to dream up such a spiralling dystopia, which blends gritty reality and fantasy role-play games with all the warped logic of a nightmare.
Evening Standard
Alistair McDowall's slippery, gripping dystopian thriller . . . enthralling, unexpectedly funny and expertly maintained. . . . Clever, creepy and compelling.
Financial Times
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