Judgment Day images

Peter Lathan from the British Theatre Guide had mixed feelings about the production, but highlighted Joseph's performance as being on top form.

Joseph Millson plays Thomas Hudetz, a stationmaster with matinee hero good looks, based in a sleepy little town that might be located on either side of the Czech-German border. He is perfection personified in his bearing and professional performance.

If there is a weakness, it is connected to a shrewish wife 13 years his senior, played by Suzanne Burden. The rights and wrongs are unclear but his susceptibility to temptation forms the play's core. In a moment of madness, Hudetz succumbs to a kiss from the publican's engaged daughter and enters his own personal tragedy.

James Macdonald's production is atmospheric and there are allegorical messages to be mined but even though Joseph Millson is on top form, Judgement Day feels slight, much more the stuff of an easily forgotten short story than a novel or epic drama.

Michael Coveney for What's On Stage awarded 4 stars.

Macdonald marshals the cast – boosted by supernumeraries – in a relentless grip of tension, so that the final scenes of ghost-like apparitions and dead of night encounters follow without any jolts or jumps. The moving platform is backed off by a semi-circular wooden wall and the separate locations of the tavern, the viaduct, the chemist’s shop and domestic interiors are simply, and sculpturally, evoked...

It’s a wonderful restoration of a great play and fully vindicates Hampton’s persistent advocacy of Horvath over the years, both on stage and in print. The rush of the trains, and the sense of both physical and moral danger throughout, is brilliantly sustained in Neil Austin’s amazing lighting and Christopher Shutt’s expertly chilling soundtrack.