Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Playhouse Theatre - theatre review: 'Tamsin Greig is the emotional core of the show'

Stellar performances from Tamsin Greig and Haydn Gwynne carry this musical version of Pedro Almodóvar’s Eighties film
In a tailspin: Tamsin Grieg plays voiceover artist Pepa in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Picture: Alastair Muir/Rex)
Henry Hitchings9 March 2015

Pedro Almodóvar’s Eighties film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is a giddy farce, and its camp theatricality always made it a strong candidate for a stage adaptation. Four and a bit years on from an extravagant and unsuccessful showing on Broadway, this musical version gets a fresh chance in a more focused, less bombastic form.

Crucial to its appeal are stellar performances from Tamsin Greig and Haydn Gwynne. For Greig this is a first foray into musical theatre, and while her singing voice is unlikely to win her an army of new admirers her acting is detailed and nimble.

She plays voiceover artist Pepa, ditched by her lover Ivan and thrown into a tailspin. As she wrestles with her feelings about his faithless excesses, she finds her home turning into a menagerie of oddballs: the unwelcome guests include Ivan’s nerdy but amorous son Carlos (Haydn Oakley), his uptight fiancee Marisa (Seline Hizli), and suicidal model Candela, whose hyperactive angst is enjoyably conveyed by Anna Skellern.

Capturing Pepa’s mix of clumsiness, disappointment and fury, Greig is the show’s emotional core. Meanwhile Gwynne is fierce, poised and sad as Ivan’s formidable wife Lucia, who has spent nearly twenty years abandoned in a mental hospital and now seems bent on revenge. There’s also lovely work from Richard Afonso as a taxi driver with whom Pepa shares her deepest intimacies.

In the first half the show itself teeters on the verge of a nervous breakdown, with an especially uncertain opening number. Bartlett Sher’s production takes too long to look fully at ease. The score is by David Yazbek — who also provides lyrics, while the book is by Jeffrey Lane — and though it pulses with Latin rhythms and clever twists, there aren’t enough genuinely flavoursome tunes.

Thanks to a fizzier and more fluent second half this is a musical that leaves one feeling well entertained. But even if its vitality in the end proves charming, the journey is a rather bumpy one.

Until May 9 (0844 871 7631, womenonthevergemusical.com)

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