Sam Marlowe — Theater Critic

Watching her, though, is anything but boring. On a pitch-perfect 1970s set by Peter McKintosh – vomitous wallpaper, dark brown veneer cabinets – we get our first glimpse of her, with fabulous blonde blow-out and sexy orange evening dress, dancing wildly on her coffee table to Donna Summer (superb movement direction is by James Cousins). It’s a fantasy moment – a similar, more grotesque sequence involving her hapless guests opens the second act – and it thrillingly sets up the tension between Beverly’s image of herself and the tedious, beige reality of her mundane existence, married to Kevin Bishop’s weary estate agent Laurence.

It’s a complex dance in which two couples ensnared in duplicity drag a third into their machinations, with escalating farcical complications. In Phillip Breen’s in-the-round production, it’s emphatically of its time, and makes no effort to disguise the fact – and, performed by a crack cast, it still delivers some belly laughs. But it also feels overlong and occasionally laborious, the comic engine taking time to grind into gear and the broadly drawn characters sometimes grating, for all the energy of their embodiment here.

Plot-wise, though, the show is far more diffuse and meandering than either the film or the novel. Characters are thinly drawn in Welsh’s baggy book; it’s as if the story has been castrated, all its cynical, tough, jagged wit, all its fuck-you attitude lopped off. Instead, it’s ploddingly literal, often lapsing into mawkishness and soapy tedium – repeatedly ramming its social conscience down our throats, theatrically it’s almost in Blood Brothers territory, although it’s significantly less emotionally effective. And it suffers from a fatal lack of momentum – each time it starts to get going, another pointless song turns up to bring it grinding to a halt again.

Characters sing into hand-held microphones and, for the crucifixion, Ryder’s Jesus is lashed with electrical leads to a pair of crossed mic stands. His first appearance is also at the mic, with his guitar, and Ryder cuts a suitably rock-star figure throughout, entirely apt and at home in this environment. But as an actor, Ryder doesn’t quite convince; there’s a posturing, presentational flavour to his performance. And vocally, while he unsurprisingly has no difficulty soaring to the falsetto heights of the role, he’s less comfortable in the lower register, where there’s not only a lack of firepower, but sometimes of audibility, the words blurry and breathy.

Erivo seems ill at ease with the material. There’s a hesitancy about her performance, as if she were wrong-footed by the technology that surrounds her. A scattering of arch, self-conscious moments and sly humour are part of the deal in Williams’ interpretation, but nothing feels truly felt and, as she switches between characters, the individual voices are not always properly differentiated. The overall effect is slightly ramshackle, sluggish and, in the end, frustratingly short on dash and drama.

Neil Austin’s elegantly shifting lighting, trickling through the wooden slats of Hatley’s set, helps establish the passing of the hours from morning to afternoon. But there’s still woefully little tension to engage here. Kate Waters’ fight scenes, as well as the ultimate denouement, are unconvincing and lack firepower. There are heavy-handed references to the gung-ho cowboy attitude of Trump’s America: “Something is rotten here, this whole damn country,” mutters Kane; they replace the film’s controversial subtextual critique of McCarthyism but feel too on-the-nose to compensate. As the hands on that clock finally approach 12, what you’re chiefly left thinking is, what a waste of talent – and what a waste of time.

Irresistible ursine antics make a hit of this new musical based on Michael Bond’s beloved creation.

It knocks the breath from your body and leaves you gasping, every moment taut and vibrating with passionate intensity… It’s a blisteringly modern take on the show – a production that’s articulately in dialogue with our 21st-century world of image manipulation, interchangeable identity, dubious iconography and deep division. And above all, it’s an absolute blast. Unmissable.

Designed by Chloe Lamford, the production presents some striking stage pictures, often buttressing moments of peak tension. But there’s a mechanical quality both to the staging and to some of the acting, and it never feels as if there’s enough at stake. And although real-life mother and daughter Imelda Staunton and Bessie Carter are focused and meticulous as Kitty and Vivie Warren, and while there’s plenty of gristle to chew on here, there’s somehow a lack of bone, blood and, ultimately, heart.

Designed by Chloe Lamford, the production presents some striking stage pictures, often buttressing moments of peak tension. But there’s a mechanical quality both to the staging and to some of the acting, and it never feels as if there’s enough at stake. And although real-life mother and daughter Imelda Staunton and Bessie Carter are focused and meticulous as Kitty and Vivie Warren, and while there’s plenty of gristle to chew on here, there’s somehow a lack of bone, blood and, ultimately, heart.

There is an immediate, and fundamental, problem: not only are these shallow idiots – here a bunch of vacuous urbanites in search of a place to have brunch – too thinly drawn to feel properly human, but there’s not a single compelling or convincing relationship between them. Obviously, the piece is highly stylised in an effort to replicate Bunuel’s off-the-wall aesthetic. But – in a slick, soulless production by director Joe Mantello – as theatre, it makes pretty thin gruel, leaving us as hungry and dissatisfied as the show’s perpetually frustrated posse.

McGregor’s Henry ends up as little more than the fraying ball of wool batted about in the catfights, and Raicek saddles him with some truly toe-curling moments in his steamier encounters with Debicki’s coolly poised Mathilde. It’s Fleetwood who supplies the stellar turn here, by turns vengeful, maudlin and magnificent. I just wish she had something more flavourful and substantial to sink those sharp teeth into.

Flinging out bitchy aperçus and florid pronouncements, and passing life-changing edicts on a whim, Bailey’s is a Richard who is instantly guaranteed to make enemies. His boredom with the actual business of affairs of state is flagrant, and we see him lounging, snorting cocaine and enjoying some homoerotic flirtation with his hangers-on, or kicking the walking frame out from under a frail John of Gaunt (on press night, Martin Carroll standing in for an indisposed Clive Wood). Besotted with his own celebrity, he heedlessly courts laughs by flinging out cruel jokes and, on hearing of violent rebellion erupting in Ireland, is most immediately preoccupied by the attention-grabbing opportunity he thinks it offers to play the conquering hero.

The conversations on which we eavesdrop are thoughtful and spikily funny, and Bartlett adroitly tweaks the balance of power as circumstances bend the relationships into unexpected shapes, as well as questioning which conventional impulses would creep into the most assiduously progressive set-up. Yet the stakes never feel high enough. It’s all so considered, so measured and cerebral, and although Kate in particular keeps talking about fun, that’s the very last thing anything represented here looks like.

Simon Lipkin’s Fagin, a rackety con man with a flair for theatrics, is a scene-stealer, his carapace of ruthlessness, hardened by decades of survival and self-preservation, occasionally cracking to allow some tenderness to seep out, as when he puts the bewildered Oliver to bed at his den’s fireside. Some of his vaudevillian embellishments – particularly in the panicked reckoning of Reviewing the Situation – are a distraction: gags that go for easy laughs when we’d rather engage more fully with Fagin’s dilemma. But it’s unarguably a hugely charismatic performance.

Simon Lipkin’s Fagin, a rackety con man with a flair for theatrics, is a scene-stealer, his carapace of ruthlessness, hardened by decades of survival and self-preservation, occasionally cracking to allow some tenderness to seep out, as when he puts the bewildered Oliver to bed at his den’s fireside. Some of his vaudevillian embellishments – particularly in the panicked reckoning of Reviewing the Situation – are a distraction: gags that go for easy laughs when we’d rather engage more fully with Fagin’s dilemma. But it’s unarguably a hugely charismatic performance.

The acting is both raw and precise, and O’Hara maintains a hair-trigger tension as Harris flings us between shock, hilarity and horror. For all that, the play feels overlong, and the sense of the characters as fully developed individuals is fitful, squeezed by the heightened tone of the writing. Yet it is a fearlessly probing work that goes much further than flirting with the politically unsayable; confrontational and insistently troubling.

This harrowing, tough-minded musical about mental illness, trauma, love and family is a genuinely courageous attempt to expand the form. Written by Tom Kitt (music) and Brian Yorkey (book and lyrics), it was a multi-award-winning Broadway hit in 2009; now Michael Longhurst’s British premiere production, first seen at the Donmar last summer, triumphantly transfers to the West End. Maybe some details of the staging don’t register with quite the same impact in a less intimate venue. But the show still rips out your heart and hands it back to you, bruised but overflowing. The cast of six is superlative, and Caissie Levy, returning in the lead role of Diana Goodman, is phenomenal, her every moment meticulously calibrated and freighted with delicately observed emotion, and her vocals frankly jaw-dropping.

Matthew Warchus’ crisp production features a couple of heavyweight stars returning to the stage – Anna Maxwell Martin and James Corden – and Penhall’s dialogue is packed with zap and zing. But the play is at once too narrow and too broad: it tackles overarching themes of the right’s bogeys ‘woke’ and ‘cancel culture’, as well as political alienation, the crisis in mental-health care and divisions of wealth, class and gender. Yet it’s a little airless, the issues funnelled through over-convenient individual circumstances in neat sound bites and discussed in a static setting that quickly begins to feel a touch contrived. Still, there’s plenty to chew on here, and the performances are pretty much faultless.

At the thumping heart of it all is McKellen’s fabulous Falstaff. This lord of misrule, an aristocrat and petty criminal slumming it with the working class, is a slothful, wheezing, stinking creature of appetite, a stained vest straining over his ample, quivering gut (McKellen is extravagantly but persuasively padded). He seems to have something perpetually in his mouth – drool, phlegm, an unwholesome morsel of the greasy fast food that he crams in there – and each line has the flavour of some self-serving scheme inching its maggoty way out of his booze-soaked brain.

A serene smile battling with tiny nervous gestures, her eyes increasingly somnolent and vague as the drug kicks in, Clarkson is shattering. Cox’s James combines an ox-like bulk and power with the silver-haired, self-conscious elegance of an old stager. We see flashes of the saloon-bar raconteur and when he hits the whiskey his face acquires a devilish distortion of mingled glee and pain – yet he’s devastating, too, in the final scenes, tenderly cradling his wife’s wedding dress while Mary is lost in reverie.

A strange adaptation of a strange film, for a show with so many cameras onstage, this new musical displays a maddening lack of focus. Directed and written by Ivo van Hove, with songs by singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright, it’s based on John Cassavetes’ avant-garde 1977 movie, in which a famous actor preparing for the opening of a new Broadway-bound play loses her grip on reality and runs amok. The wayward plot involves a ghostly girl, the spectre of old age, hunger for love, and copious amounts of booze – all laced with lashings of meta-drama. But if Cassavetes’ original succeeds in compelling, thanks largely to striking cinematography and a raw performance from Gena Rowlands, this version, which features live video footage, is so aimless and tonally muddled that it feels downright weird. Which might be less of a problem if it were not ultimately a bit boring.

The onstage band is a treat, too, with snarls and howls of wild brass, and David Neumann’s choreography adds texture while maintaining the momentum, blending the sinuous quiver and undulation of awakening passions and rising sap with the pumping pistons and percussive, back-breaking drudgery of eternal purgatorial suffering. Without a stronger narrative, it’s a show that only takes us, like the characters on Hauck’s cunningly deployed revolve, around in circles; but the journey is sometimes stunning.

Smith rails against the narcissism and atomisation of society engendered by an always-online culture, and against social and economic inequality and hashtag politics – all sound stuff, but all bleeding obvious; the semi-articulated enthusiasm of the audience is equally predictable. None of it feels the slightest bit dangerous or provocative, any more than the onstage rehearsals of Thomas’ band, with their on-the-nose cover of Bowie’s Changes.

Like Beth Steel’s terrific Till the Stars Come Down, which has just opened at London’s National Theatre, Butterworth’s piece is an elegiac, female-led family drama. Set in Blackpool during the 1976 heatwave, it’s beautifully layered. Days, nights and decades ebb and flow like the waves licking the gaudy Pleasure Beach, as the Webb sisters revisit the starry-eyed showbiz might-have-beens of their childhood – aspirations nurtured by their ambitious mother, who is now dying. In a pitch-perfect production from Sam Mendes, it is devastatingly moving, bitterly funny, tender, cruel and wise: a piercing reminder that all the paths we choose lead ultimately in only one direction – and time, like life, is short.