Claire Alfree

A more ambitious creative team might have turned The Great Gatsby’s keening lyricism, elusive spirit and sheer tragic beauty to its advantage. Instead, we get a screechy clodhopping musical that amps up the Roaring Twenties clichés at the expense of anything Fitzgerald had to say about class, money and the scissoring chasms between appearances and reality. Book writer Kait Kerrigan foregrounds the romance between Gatsby and Daisy in ways that make their cryptic love affair the routine stuff of a thousand Broadway power ballads – and in case we don’t get the message, a deluxe bed is at one point rolled onto the stage.

Collins really is good as Irene, radiating effervescent naivety and as giddy as a pony while finding the vulnerability in a sheltered 35-year-old who has never found the strength to challenge her own life choices. Complicating facts emerge: Manuel has a wife with whom he is estranged; she is about to marry an upright morality freak back home in Denver who comes from the same corn-fed, pioneer Christian stock as she does but whom, she manages to admit to herself for the first time, she doesn’t love. There is a lovely delicate poignancy to her admission that her favourite thing to do is steal into the houses she sells as part of her job in real estate and pretend for an afternoon another life is hers.

Yet if Foley’s production isn’t willing to recreate the film point by point (and how could it?), then what is it instead? It’s a question the show never adequately answers, trapped between the film’s formidable legacy and an inability to recreate it anew theatrically. Hildegard Bechtler’s set exemplifies the problem – there’s the odd nod to the original, notably the War Room’s circular overhead light, but it settles mainly for perfunctory designs in regulation 1960s grey: the War Room, the office, in the second act a vast bomber jet, past which fly projected imagery of the Russian tundra. A designer such as Bob Crowley might have found a way to translate Ken Adam’s original stark chiaroscuro into a fresh theatrical language; instead we get dull bright lighting that flattens everything it touches.

Yet many of the details of Jackson’s sad, strange, entirely tragic story are both well known and impossible to view today entirely outside the prism of the allegations that dogged the last two decades of his life. MJ The Musical is not exactly an apologia, but while it refuses to indulge the tabloid image of Jackson as a freak, it’s arguably guilty of magical thinking in casting him exclusively as a victim. But does this make his art – as so beautifully honoured here – any less intoxicating? I’m not sure in the end it does.

This is a bare-bones Lear – stripped of much of its weird cosmic poetry and shorn too of much of its complexity. The claustrophobic intimacy suits a reading that is fiercely attuned to the domestic and familial chaos at the play’s heart and the central crisis of Lear’s relationship with Jessica Revell’s single-minded Cordelia. It is less suited to the play’s restless sense of the epic and universal scope.

It’s staged surprisingly cheaply. Bargain basement video projections – a churning sea; an obscurely rendered boat house – plus predictably liberal use of smoke and mist combine with Mandalay’s dully implacable interior whose cheerless rooms under the gimlet eye of Mrs Danvers make a far from seductive shrine to the late Rebecca. As the unnamed new wife, Lauren Jones is all bitten fingernails and shrunken shoulders, thrust into a macabre psychodrama whose nuances she is initially poorly equipped to understand.