Almeida Theatre

The much-feted Sam Grabiner’s second play – following last year’s Olivier-winning Boys on the Verge of Tears – is a dark, dark comedy about a jaw-droppingly dysfunctional British Jewish family.  It is an anarchic meditation on the British Jewish psyche, that is really very fearless about ‘going there’ with certain political issues. It is about the British tradition of having a massive ding dong on Christmas Day. And it’s a comedy about living in London.  As the play begins, a bewildered Elliot (Nigel Lindsay) has arrived at the chaotic office conversion inhabited by his children Noah (Samuel Blenkin) and Tamara (Bel Powley), plus 10 other housemates who’ve mostly vacated the place because today is Christmas Day.  ‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ Elliot exclaims in horror at the room’s most noticable feature: some sort of industrial heater, suspended from the ceiling in spectacularly unwise fashion, that periodically roars into life very loudly.  It’s a dinner-party play, kind of: food is the nominal main event (a Chinese takeaway, in imitation of New York Jewish tradition), and as is the way with the genre, secrets are unveiled, revelations are revealed, etcetera.  James Macdonald’s production feels genre-cliche free, though, in part because the ‘family’ is so shambolic that food simply feels like another thing for them to argue about. Joining dithering Noah and pathologically intense Tamara is Noah’s sweet non-Jewish girlfriend Maud (Callie Cooke) and Tamara’s slick ex Aaron...

This review is from 2013. American Psycho returns reworked for 2026 with a completely new cast led by Arty Froushan as Patrick Bateman. You would think playing a murderous American yuppie with a rock-hard torso and a feather-soft grip on reality would be just the ticket for banishing the memory of loveable teatime alien The Doctor. But Matt Smith leaves surprisingly little impression as psychopathic stockbroker Patrick Bateman in this musical adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s social satire ‘American Psycho’. And that is the brilliance of his performance. Bateman is a hollow man, an identikit Wall Street hotshot, frequently mistaken for other Wall Street hotshots, who judges himself by the fractional material differences between him and his Wall Street hotshot peers. Bateman is on stage almost constantly in Rupert Goold’s production, yet Smith plays him as a strange void. His monotone voice, impassive features and perfectly toned physique are a constant deadpan, and he sings with the flat tones of the New Romantics, whose soaring electro-pop Duncan Sheik’s score apes. Smith is constantly in the foreground, but though his natural charisma draws us in, the eye slides off him. We see why Bateman is losing his marbles: his perfect Manhattan life is a prison, his only escape is to (apparently) start butchering people. ‘American Psycho’ is enormous fun. Sheik’s songs vary in hummability, but they’re generally hilarious, characters with no soul singing trashy, narcissistic pop...