'Erik and Deirdre Blake have travelled into New York City from working-class Scranton, Pennsylvania, to spend the day with their daughters Aimee, a lawyer, and Brigid, a wannabe musician working two bartending jobs to make ends meet. But the jostling jollity as they arrive in Brigid’s new rental, a dingy Chinatown flat, always has an edge. Also present is Brigid’s new boyfriend, Richard (doing the cooking), and grandma Momo, who has dementia.'

'It’s a slow burn this one but intriguing from the get-go. Joe Mantello directs a play that, at some point (the Swiss chard salad?) turns into a sort of psychological thriller.'

'The flat (the ultra detailed two-level set is by David Zinn) is prone to mishaps. Lights go out, things go a lot more than bump in the night: it often sounds like a poltergeist is doing DIY above.'

'Things are falling apart. And it’s not only the building. The Blakes are having a tough time, as is the American middle class in general. The wonder of this script by Stephen Karam is how skilfully he interlaces all of that into what seems (and I am American originally) a pretty normal event. This feels real. They josh, banter, criticise, apologise.'

'Secrets and lies. Fears and fibs. Everyone’s got a hidden story here, playing out in real time. This play won four Tonys in 2016 and this is the Broadway cast. I can hardly believe our luck.'

'They all inhabit their characters from the inside. Reed Birney is Erik, a man who couldn’t see the bright side of a shiny penny. Jayne Houdyshell is fantastic as Deirdre, the kind of mother who sends her children care packages with wind-up radios in case of a random emergency.'

'There is much to absorb here as you start to see how the American dream, for those in the middle, is under siege.'

'Still, it’s Thanksgiving. More potatoes anyone?'

To read the full review click here to visit The Times online.

'Stephen Karam’s The Humans – which won four Tony Awards in 2016 and now materialises with its utterly superb New York cast and creative team, led by director Joe Mantello, intact – serves up a family drama that might be subtitled Nightmare on Main Street.'

'Set in a drear New York Chinatown basement apartment (“duplex” but not deluxe) newly occupied by twenty something musician Brigid Blake and her decade-older partner Richard, the play follows a handful of people clustered in fragile familial amity.' 

'They’ve gathered for Thanksgiving but what is there to be grateful for? “Don’t you think it should cost less to be alive?” Reed Birney’s Erik bleakly joshes as he swigs a beer and stares into the future. It’s a throwaway remark in a play that relishes casual (often comically so) conversation, but it’s telling, with a hint of Willy Loman’s gloomy surmise in Death of a Salesman (“You end up worth more dead than alive”). Just as Miller’s masterpiece played with form, so Karam’s potent – and finally searing – portrait of what we would call over here the Jams – Just About Managings – is tricksier than it at first appears.'

'Crashes and thuds from the floor above initially combine with other spooking environmental factors to open a window on the stresses and strangeness of the neighbourhood. Yet as the piece moves on, and winter darkness – assisted by blown bulbs and fuses – takes hold, it’s as if everything we’re looking at acquires the malevolence that Erik, too close for lasting comfort to the 9/11 attacks, says he experiences in his dreams. Are we watching a naturalistic play about an ordinary family or an eerie, harrowing summation of humanity akin to Munch’s The Scream? Ingeniously, both.'

To read the full review click here to visit The Telegraph online.

'Stephen Karam’s bitterly funny and piercingly sad play was a massive hit on Broadway, where it won four Tony Awards in 2016. Edward Hall saw it and immediately wanted to produce it – he assumed this would be with a British director and cast – at Hampstead. But he also admitted to himself that Joe Mantello’s original Broadway production could not be bettered.'

'We owe Hall a debt of gratitude for his modesty and daring. He seized the opportunity of the American cast reuniting for a season in Los Angeles to bring the show over, giving us the chance to marvel at its rhythmic precision and remarkably lived-in and authentic performances.'

To read the full review click here to visit The Independent online.

'The cast brilliantly animates the crosstalk of this assertive lower-middle-class clan who are caught in conditions of slightly forced, camping-out jollity (paper plates and cups because the real things haven’t yet arrived).' 

'The greatest compliment I can pay The Humans is say — and this is by no means a given for any play — that it is overwhelmingly human.'

'Karam’s writing is fresh but has a convincingly lived-in quality, full of amicable, time-honed bickering and bantering as three generations of the just-about-managing Blake family come together to celebrate Thanksgiving. '

'Joe Mantello’s production boasts a superlative cast, totally and tonally at ease with each other.' 

To read the full review click here to visit The Evening Standard online.

'Hampstead Theatre is presumably feeling pretty pleased with itself after landing a transfer of Stephen Karam's hit 2015 Broadway play, with original cast intact. And rightly so. 'The Humans' has a pretty unimaginative set-up: a bickering family with adult kids are plonked round a Thanksgiving dinner table and left to work through their differences. But it irradiates these elements with its ghostly, comfortless vision of a crumbling society.'

'The knife-edge horror of debt and instability are heightened, in Joe Mantello's tense, naturalistic production, by doomy rumblings of something supernatural just at the edges of everyone's consciousness.'

'Ultimately, this production's haunted house rumblings feel a bit overwrought – perhaps because with writing this vivid, we don't need real ghosts to feel the chill.'

To read the full review click here to visit Time Out online