Financial Times/b>  
Ian Shuttleworth
August 2006

Downstairs in the Wildman Room, another fictional meeting takes place in Terre Haute, Edmund White's first stage play in a decade. White, intrigued by the real-life correspondence between America's leading literary gadfly Gore Vidal and the Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh as the latter waited on death row, imagines Vidal travelling to McVeigh's Indiana prison to interview him before his execution. I think White intends the human dimension to be emphasised by contrast with the Vidal character's periodic analysis of each party's tactics; in fact it is undermined by the distraction, and further by an all-too-Whitean homoerotic climax that is gratuitous in the dramatic rather than the moral sense. Nor is it surprising that old hand Peter Eyre so comprehensively dominates Arthur Darvill on the latter's first professional stage appearance, confined to a wire mesh cage as "McVeigh".

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