The Caretaker
• The Sunday Herald 
by Mark Brown
“...the brilliantly realised, assiduously detailed set [by Max Jones] for The Caretaker at the Citz (the wrecked and cluttered room of the mentally distressed Aston) is quintessential British Pinter...
...The tempo of the production undulates perfectly with the rhythms of Pinter's text, and Tina MacHugh's excellent lighting responds accordingly. This faithful yet imaginative presentation of The Caretaker confirms Breen's occasional offerings at the Citz as among the theatre's best work over the past five years.”
• The Times
October 28, 2008
Robert Dawson Scott
“…Much is made, rightly, of Pinter’s language, but Max Jones’s junk-filled set, complete in every 1950s detail, is the first thing that strikes you. Most of the Citizens’ lofty proscenium has been closed off so that the playing area really has the same volume as a grubby attic flat. And there is a moment that makes a nonsense of those who would distinguish “visual theatre” from any other kind.
As the lights come up after the interval Davies is discovered sitting on the only chair, wearing the scarlet smoking jacket that Aston has picked up for him in a junk shop and smoking, for all the world like Noël Coward.
Without a word being said, it is clear that his hubris is about to come crashing around his ears. And it says a lot for the confidence of this production that, at this point, Mick is lying on his back, from which position he goes on to deliver in its entirety the famous speech about how he is going to redecorate the flat…
Quality stuff all round”
• The Telegraph
October 29 2008
Mark Brown
“…Guest director Phillip Breen makes a successful return to Clydeside with a deceptive presentation of The Caretaker, a piece first staged in 1960.
At the outset, Breen's production looks like a conventional take on a well-known play. Max Jones's set, in particular, depicts the cluttered, semi-derelict room of Aston (psychologically distressed brother of the house's owner, Mick) with a hyper-real attention to detail which is very much the British way of doing Pinter….”
• The Stage
October 27 2008
by Gareth Vile
“…Designer Max Jones captures the seedy oppression through a set that reduces the Citizen’s expansive stage into a narrow, claustrophobic bedsit. Caught up in Aston’s collection of junk, three men shift alliances and battle for dominance. The absence of intimacy and sympathy is clear in Pinter’s truncated, lurching prose and structure - Hastie’s hesitancy, Dean Burn’s energy and O’Hare’s incongruous refinement bounce and spark off each other, pushing forward the action with a jerky, uncomfortable ferocity…
…The three strong performances and evocative set allow Breen to rediscover Pinter as a dark humorist with a warm humanism...
This is a triumphant and direct interpretation of an author too often reduced to pause and cliché.”
• The Guardian:
October 29 2008
Mark Fisher
“…Phillip Breen's careful production draws us quietly into this sad portrait of male loneliness. Tam Dean Burn is a twitchy Davies, in contrast to Robert Hastie's mesmerisingly still Aston, as much a symbol of 1950s British reserve as a product of electric shock therapy. As Mick, Eugene O'Hare is a warped music-hall act in a Joe Orton leather jacket, undermining Davies with double-talking repartee, but hiding behind no less of a front. The Caretaker retains not only its elliptical strangeness but also its ability to resonate with the times.”
• The List 
by Steve Cramer
“...In front of Max Jones’ grimly detailed bedsit set, Breen’s production points outwards at a society overloaded with aspiration and bereft of the means of achieving satisfaction on either a spiritual or material level...”
• The Scotsman
Joyce McMillan
November 7 2008
"...Max Jones's set – deliberately placed in a long, low slightly skewed slice of the Citz's big stage – offers a classic vision of the squalid, cluttered and comfortless attic bedsit, in a half-derelict house somewhere in post-war London, where the quiet, damaged but kindly Aston offers a bed for the night to the appalling old tramp Davies, dirty, opportunistic, ungrateful, but endlessly articulate."
• Onstage Scotland
Michael Cox
"...Director Phillip Breen should be praised for his sharp direction, not only in movement but in orchestrating line delivery... What’s also impressive is how excellent the design is. Max Jones’s set is far more complicated than it first appears, and it gives ample opportunity for each character to interact with their surroundings. Tina Machugh’s lighting design and Matilda Brown’s sound design are equally effective, giving the right ambiance to the production."
Measure for Measure
• Theatre Wales website
April 18, 2008
By Victor Hallet
“…Max Jones’ superb and overpowering set, with its rose window and massive grill set in the floor, transforms the Emlyn Williams theatre into an increasingly claustrophobic space. Phillip Breen’s direction ensures that not a moment is wasted; the time fairly flies by as events move ahead with ferocious forward momentum. This is a gripping, exhilarating and often very funny production of a play that’s not at all easy to bring off well.”
• Western Mail
April 18 2008
By Gail Cooper
“…Designer Max Jones has created a clever set which doubles as a train station, prison yard, convent and royal court, with a cast iron oriel window throwing changing reflections onto the stage. At one point a huge crucifix descends to remind us of the prevailing morality of the age….”
• Chester Chronicle
April 20 2008
By Michael Green
“…THE first thing you notice upon entering the Emlyn Williams Theatre is blackness.
Not necessarily anything to do with director Philip Breen’s production of Shakespeare’s play - more to do with a reordering of the performance space that has you greeted by an enormous black curtain hiding the seating and auditorium.
But it proves to be a perfect marriage of venue and subject matter for there is dark material indeed about to unfold the other side of that shadowy obstacle.
The unfamiliar set-up of Mold’s wonderful studio theatre now brings the action even more up close and personal with seats surrounding three sides of an open performance area that almost makes you part of the scenery. It looks permanent and I, for one, would have no objection to such a move.
Certainly it added to the considerable impact of a work by Shakespeare that veers wildly in tone and approach from bawdy comedy to attempted rape of a nun - no wonder it has frequently been given the tag ‘problem play’...”
• Perfect Way website
May 16 2008
by Simon Harris
“...Max Jones is one of the most exciting graduates to emerge from the Theatre Design course at The Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, which has been transformed under the guidance of Sean Crowley and his team to become one of the very best places to study in the whole of the UK. Max caught my attention with the flair and bravura of his graduate showcase designs back in 2001 and has worked with me on several productions since.
…Max has established a good relationship with Clwyd Theatr Cymru also, working with both Tim Baker and Phillip Breen. So it was worth the trip to see how subtly and imaginatively Max had transformed the Emlyn Williams Studio at Clwyd for Phillip Breen’s recent production of Measure For Measure. The seating had been re-configured to a thrust setting and this lent a welcome intimacy to the performance, which was located in a fin-de-siecle Vienna of the late nineteenth century. Unless you knew the space, you might have been hard pressed to realise that Max had created a wholly new arched back wall, housing a beautiful, circular stained glass window….
Its central, dominating position lent underlying symbolism to the exploration of mercy and justice in the play, which I found unexpectedly moving. The subterranean jailhouse, situated directly and hellishly beneath, was also a nice touch.
Having seen the Complicite production at The RNT some years ago, I must say that I found Phillip Breen’s production had a deeply engaging clarity and coherence…
…The costumes, as one might expect from a company run by Terry Hands, were beautifully detailed and appropriate.”
Salt Meets Wound
• UK Theatre Web
14 May 2007
Derek Benfield
“This is a very big, quality production but an overblown play…Given such doubts about the material, Paul Robinson directs with flair and achieves many moments of beauty.
…It is an indictment of the play that many of the most beautiful dramatic moments came in the scene changes, where characters flowed past each other to re-arrange the set, yet made these necessities pertinent to the story.
Max Jones offers a deceptively versatile set and sumptuous costumes which allowed the audience to easily keep track of time and place. Stunning production quality lifts a flawed, over-eager play…
Paul Robinson and Theatre 503 are to be commended for tackling such an ambitious play and succeed in presenting an evening rich in delights…”
• The Guardian 
May 22 2007
Lyn Gardner
“…Tom Morton-Smith's first play is nothing if not ambitious. If he doesn't quite succeed in tying it all together, you have to admire his sheer bravado for even trying. This is unformed work, but the writing has energy and breadth, and Morton-Smith juggles ideas and emotions as he places political and personal narratives side by side, and shows how history and the present rub shoulders in the dust. The plot eventually collapses in a little heap, but you forgive it because it is very watchable.
Paul Robinson's ambitious production is bursting at the seams, but it serves the play well, and elicits classy performances from the eight-strong cast.”
• Time Out
(Critics Choice)
“There’s a feeling running through Tom Morton-Smith’s massively ambitious play that, seeing as the USSR and the US so ruinously misunderstood Islamic Central Asia – the breeding ground of the Taliban – it’s somehow our job in Britain to understand it better. Morton-Smith fashions from this attitude a monumentally confused voodoo doll called Dylan Singer, then puts him squarely under the magnifying glass… until he starts to burn…
…The dialogue crackles with vicious insight and humour, Paul Robinson directs with verve right up to the lacerating climax and Damian O’Hare and Catherine Cusack are both absolutely tremendous in the lead roles….”
The Grapes of Wrath
• The Guardian 
September 25 2006
Alfred Hickling
“...The great challenge of The Grapes of Wrath is not so much its length as its breadth. Steinbeck casts every episode of this dust-bowl exodus in wide-screen, and Baker, aided by the evocative expanses of Max Jones's set, stays faithful to the novel's panoramic vision, while never forfeiting a sense of momentum.
..The great merit of this production is that it presents many vividly realised pictures, yet never loses sight of the bigger one.”
• British Theatre Guide
2006
by Kevin Catchpole
“Standing ovations appear the likely order of the evening at Clwyd Theatre Cymru after performances of Tim Baker’s gripping production of John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece of depression America, The Grapes of Wrath.
...Max Jones’s design is as stark as the rest of the performance, its bleak simplicity leaving the actors to tell the real story of their surroundings amid the unyielding, hostility of both big country and many of the strangers, deputies and con-men encountered en route.
After Ma’s opening soliloquy, the gaunt backdrop opens to a frame of the Joad family as they prepare their battered motor truck, one of thousands which rolled across the state line into the sunshine state in the late 1930’s. Here and there are glimpses of the American scene, a tiny white church or ranch on the plain.
Things could hardly be worse, yet, after the interval, somehow they are. Heavy rains, brilliantly created by mists which soak the stage, destroy the cotton crops of their new world and weary, often sick migrants trudge from floods to the shelter of abandoned rail wagons...”
• The Stage
Victor Hallett
Tim Baker’s powerful epic production brings Steinbeck’s characters to full-blooded life, as well as the ferocity of the author’s anger at the desperate plight of the families forced to flee the American dustbowl only to find the promised paradise of California a living hell.
Designer Max Jonas’ realisation of the journey reflects the scale. Often the stage seems bare, giving a sense of vast landscapes, even though it contains the Joad’s full-size jalopy, whose manhandling on and off the effective revolve gives an equally strong sense of the journey’s hardships. It’s later joined, in a jaw-dropping moment, by two railway freight cars and yet there’s always room for the cast of 16...
• Planet
Gwen Ellis
“...The production is vast. There is a cast of sixteen adults and assorted children. The set (Max Jones) and the lighting (Tina MacHugh) manage to convey extremes of climate, such as the heat and aridity of the landscape on the one hand and the claustrophobia that comes with the rain that destroys the cotton crop on the other. There is wonderful attention to detail: beautiful models of homesteads and shanties appear in the far distance, framed by the massive black flat pieces that make them look even further away. In the straw-coloured hard-baked floor, tiny bits of vegetation are inserted. Nothing else can grow here. Boxcars, wooden crate-like animals, house the desperate families as sheets of mist oppress the stage in unending rain. Central to the staging is the jalopy that is home, transport and means of escape to the Joad family. It is wheeled on and off, it is spun round, it is climbed upon, it is slept in, it provides a death bed until finally it, too, dies...
This is an epic piece of theatre in style and execution”
• The Chester Chronicle
AWESOME, gripping, an emotional roller coaster that can only get better as it goes along...
...Designer Max Jones’ set is magnificent - a huge, empty stage with black screens that slide up, down or sideways, as the direction demands. You get the impression that anything can happen in that space, and it does. The wonderful jalopy, wheeled on and off a revolving stage and created entirely by the theatre workshop staff, plays almost as prominent a part as the actors....”
• The Western Mail
Gail Cooper
“The "star" in this ensemble piece must be the full-size jalopy car that, Beverly Hillbillies- style, transports the family on their epic journey. The jalopy is moved bodily around the stage to indicate miles travelled, while the narrative is moved on crisply by an excellent body of musicians, singing and playing music from the era, including some rousing square dances and moving hymns.
No other set is really needed, and the vast black screens that overshadow the actors adequately provide a feeling of the oppression of their situation. Dustbowl colours of faded denim and washed-out brown pervade the costumes. We never see the rich oranges and vibrant greens of the promised land, always just out of reach for the Joad’s...”
• Reviews Gate
September 30 2006
Timothy Ramsden
“...The action’s many transitions are finely-handled, Max Jones’ bare-space set with its many temporary elements helping events along, while Tina MacHugh’s beautifully angled and atmospheric lighting sculpts realities out of the overcrowded yet lonesome West...”
• Liverpool Daily Post
Lew Baxter
“...The sets by Max Jones and lighting by Tina MacHugh are minimalist yet starkly and harshly realistic, as the family is forced to take to the road in an old jalopy after losing their land during the Great Depression"
