The Armour, Langham Hotel - theatre review

S Club 7's Hannah Spearritt stars in this project from the Langham hotel, which falls flat as an 'immersive' theatre experience
Troubled: Hannah Spearritt as Jade and Thomas Craig as Franky (Picture: Tristram Kenton)
Fiona Mountford11 March 2015

There’s a growing sub-genre of site-specific plays set in hotels, but unfortunately The Armour is no noble addition to the club.

For a start, it’s the result of a vanity project, commissioned by the five-star Langham Hotel to celebrate its 150th anniversary. This wouldn’t matter, though, if the end result were anything other than three anaemic playlets.

Writer Ben Ellis and director James Hillier give us no intimate, narrative sense of hotel life, as we traipse dutifully from rooms on the lower ground up to the third and, finally, seventh floors, to watch scenes set in 2015, 1973 and 1871. It’s a real lack of connection and we leave the performance feeling entirely un-immersed, which isn’t a great result for supposedly immersive theatre.

The first two-handed scene, about a troubled pop star (Hannah Spearritt) is blandly generic; I couldn’t have cared less whether Jade stopped tantruming in time to take to the stage.

The next playlet, set in the era when the BBC occupied the Langham, has easily the most potential, although Ellis tries to pack far too much into its half-hour running time. The BBC connection would, surely, have been a worthy theme for an entire commission.

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1/50

Lastly, it’s the turn of the exiled Emperor Napoleon III and his wife, but there’s nowhere near enough time for the elegiac mood here to take hold.

Quite who would pay up to £49.50, plus booking fee, for a ticket to this show is entirely beyond me.

Until April 4 (0871 220 0260, defibrillatortheatre.com)

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