Lily Collins makes a sensational stage debut opposite Money Heist’s Álvaro Morte in this two-hander about the worst hen-night cop-off ever, between a vacuous American chatterbox and an arrogant older Spaniard.
The Emily in Paris star has presence and timing, and her appearance generates a crackle of excitement comparable to the mania that greeted Sarah Jessica Parker’s at the Savoy in January.
Shame that Collins and the wolfish Morte – a respected stage actor and director in Spain before he became a lockdown favourite in Netflix’s crime drama – are stuck in a phony emotional rollercoaster by American writer Bess Wohl.
Her script shunts the two characters through peaks and troughs of feeling without any thought for consistency. They’re all over each other! No, they’re at each other’s throats! No, wait, they’re being forced to confront the yawning emptiness at the centre of their lives. Most of this is played – and very well played – for glib yucks.
We first see Irene and Manuel banging through the door of a small Barcelona apartment, snogging furiously. She’s artfully blonde, gamine and spectacularly drunk in a silver-lame jumpsuit and one shoe. He’s impatient and saturnine in a beard and a black suit. She pukes, but undeterred he gets her other shoe off and is soon sucking her toes – not something I had on my 2024 theatrical bingo card, but here we are.
Suddenly, they’re at loggerheads about the Iraq War and the conquistadors, her thoughtless Denver insularity – she wrongly calls him “Manolo” and refers to the Sagrada Familia cathedral outside the window as “that thing” – clashing with his old-world arrogance.
She gabbles about her pioneer ancestors, her job, her partner, her inane fantasies. Truly, Collins has cornered the market in exquisite, exasperating Americans abroad. He withholds and sneers, slagging off McDonald’s and taunting her for pursuing him. Red flags start to wave: the building is condemned; the apartment has a feminine touch. When Manuel’s tragic secret is revealed, it renders much of what has gone before frankly creepy.
The dialogue has superficial zing and polish. I smiled a lot. And the two leads have such chemistry you ignore the sudden swings between lust and loathing, intoxication and sobriety, until they become too improbable to bear.
What’s keeping these two people in this room apart from the playwright’s need to generate conflict? There’s some confusion too over their ages. The doll-like Collins looks deliberately young, though actually playing her age: Manuel should surely be older. Again, weird. I think there’s a subtextual strand about the way large-scale, domestic terror atrocities have changed America, but I didn’t buy it.
Lynette Linton, soon to stand down as artistic director of the Bush Theatre, presumably leapt at the chance to helm a major commercial project that could turn a buzzy star into a stage actor. Her brisk, efficient production accentuates the play’s surface virtues and hurries you over the gaping cracks. There’s a physical confidence and looseness in the acting that only comes when performers trust a director.
Frankie Bradshaw’s set and costumes are fine, though I could have done without the portentous, wafting shadow of a girlish figure on the back wall.
As Jamie Lloyd’s dazzling recent shows with Nicole Scherzinger and Tom Holland showed, there is absolutely a place for revelatory star casting and sensation in the West End. Those who’ve bought tickets to gawp at Collins won’t be disappointed. But she and Morte are carrying the play, rather than the other way round.
Duke of York’s Theatre, until January 11, barcelonatheplay.com.
