Did Billie Piper's West End Debut in Treats Do the Trick for Critics?

Billie Piper in Treats

Billie Piper is making her London stage debut in a revival of Christopher Hampton’s 1976 play Treats. Directed by Laurence Boswell, Piper plays a woman at the centre of a love triangle involving her former boyfriend (Kris Marshall) and current beau (Laurence Fox). Did Treats do the trick for critics?

Here’s a sampling of what they had to say:

Mark Shenton in his Theatre.com Review: "Following Daniel Radcliffe’s theatrical exposure in Equus, former pop poppet Billie Piper is another sometime child star now seeking to make her mark as an adult stage actress. But while Radcliffe throws off the mantle of Harry Potter by playing a troubled adolescent of an entirely more disturbed sort, Piper has stayed closer to home for her own stage debut by playing a woman with a complicated personal life...Piper, with her wide gash of a mouth revealing a toothy grin, is by turns both moody and marvelous as the conflicted woman, slowly revealing her character’s vulnerability and need. Poised and strong yet vulnerable and thoughtful, reservoirs of pain flow out of her during the emotional rollercoaster ride that her prevaricating character goes on. One senses that despite her young years, Piper has already been forced to make some of these choices herself. Marshall, meanwhile, brilliantly captures the edge of sexual allure and ugly menace that makes Dave so abrasive yet so compelling. While Fox—a lanky puppydog of a man who is far more sincere—may fail to win her in the play, justice is served in real life since he’s the one who gets the girl offstage. This smart, hip play cuts deceptively deep and painfully in Laurence Boswell’s sharp, elegant revival, making Treats work a treat all over again."

Benedict Nightingale of The London Times: “Treats leaves me modestly amused, not least because of Billie Piper, who plays the buxom, toothy apex of what used to be known as the eternal triangle. In recent weeks the Piper Bug—the virus that forced the actress out of several previews—had been competing for headlines with the Daniel Radcliffe Bum…But, thank God, all that nonsense is over. Piper was onstage last night, coping decently enough with the tricky part of Ann…Does the play show its age? Some minor changes, such as Basra and insurgents substituting for the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus, take care of that problem. Sceptically observed love-triangles don't date. That is why they are called eternal.”

Kris Marshall, Laurence Fox and Billie Piper in Treats

Michael Billington of The Guardian: “Hampton…wrote the play partly in response to the success of his version of Ibsen's A Doll's House: instead of a play about a woman who decisively walks out, he would create one about a woman who inconclusively stays put…My problem in 1976 was that I couldn't believe in Ann's restricted possibilities: why, in the age of women's lib, was she forced to choose between an amiable wimp and a destructive neurotic? And, by updating the action to the present, Hampton makes her dilemma even less credib...one is left admiring the dexterity of the three performers. Ms Piper…intelligently suggests hidden reserves of strength inside the indecisive Ann… Although the performances are fine, it is a play in which the shrewdness of Hampton's observation cannot entirely compensate for the narrowness of the world on display.”

Charles Spencer of The Daily Telegraph: “In its mixture of self-regarding cleverness and tendentious sexual politics Treats takes some beating…While the two men in Ann's life…witter on interminably, Hampton offers virtually no clue into what makes his heroine tick. For much of the time Ann is an almost entirely passive figure, and when she finally turns on the hapless but well-meaning Patrick and returns to the boorish Dave, we are vouchsafed zero insight into her feelings…neither Hampton's text nor Laurence Boswell's flaccid production achieve the faintest frisson of erotic desire…This is a mechanical and soulless little play that reminds us why Hampton has never quite made it into the premier league of British dramatists.”

Alice Jones of The Independent: “[A] promising premise seems to have been boiled down to a rehashing of the classic problem-page dilemma—should Ann stay with the guy who Treats her well but is “too nice” or go with the alluring, but abusive, bad boy? It’s a tired idea, further weighed down by a schematic structure which gives each of the trio a solo scene, a scene with each of the other characters and three ensemble scenes. It is Ann who suffers the most from this. In the first half she barely utters 20 lines and by the end of the play we have no idea of what makes her tick. Faced with this two-dimensional character, Piper finds it hard to shine…As bully-boy Dave, Marshall has a good sense of comedy…Fox gives a performance which is amusing and touching… All three actors have come to the West End from higher profile television roles. What a shame then that they have ended up in the closest theatre gets to soap opera.”