What's on Stage has done its usual excellent round up of the professional reviews for Neil LaBute's play Reason's To Be Pretty at the Almeida Theatre. 

I wasn't wholly convinced by it but found it nonetheless an entertaining evening and gave it three and a half stars. A few theatre Tweeps have been less impressed with comments raging from 'vapid', 'shallow' and 'ignores the deeper issues'. There don't seem to be many other blogger reviews around just yet but the critics seem to have liked it which, I confess, I'm a little surprised by. Of the seven reviews featured by WOS, all gave it four stars with comments including:

"The American dramatist Neil LaBute is a master of imaginative unpleasantness ... There is no doubt that he knows how to hold an audience - even if you sometimes hate yourself for becoming so gripped by his dramas."

Charles Spencer, The Telegraph

And

"The play may not possess the visceral shock-value of previous LaBute work but it has more humanity and confirms the validity of Bacon's observation that: 'There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.'"

Michael Billington, The Guardian

It's pencilled in to be one of the plays discussed on this coming week's As Yet Unnamed London Theatre Podcast, I'll post a link here if it is.

Here are some pics from the opening night after party (photographer seems to be obsessed with Billie Piper)