Rupert Goold’s revival of American Psycho at the Almeida Theatre in Islington is a sleek, menacing, often magnificent production that builds nearly three hours of sustained dread, then collapses in the final stretch. It is very nearly a five-star evening, and the gap between what it achieves and what it squanders is genuinely painful.
The musical, adapted from Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 satire of Wall Street excess, follows Patrick Bateman, a 1980s investment banker whose designer-label life conceals something far darker. Bateman obsesses over business cards and restaurant reservations at the exclusive Dorsia, competes with colleagues over tailoring and tan lines, and begins a killing spree across Manhattan. Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s book charts the unravelling with dark comic precision, while Duncan Sheik’s score pumps relentless electro-pop through the proceedings like a synth-heavy heartbeat monitor that never quite flatlines.
Arty Froushan, in a performance that would justify the ticket price even if everything else fell apart, is extraordinary as Bateman. Where Matt Smith played the role with dead-eyed cool in the 2013 original, Froushan finds something more neurotic and more dangerous: a man who flickers between winning smile and predatory sneer so quickly you start to distrust your own reading of him. His Bateman is deluded into believing he is the apex predator in every room, when in truth he cannot secure a table, hangs his artwork the wrong way up, and delivers hilariously poor cultural opinions with total conviction. The physical commitment is remarkable too. Froushan barely leaves the stage across two acts, and the control he exerts over the Almeida’s intimate thrust – strutting, prowling, collapsing – is the kind of star turn that makes careers.
The ensemble around him is staggeringly good. Natalie Gallacher’s casting deserves its own round of applause: she has assembled a company so uniformly gorgeous that the production doubles as the most physically attractive night of theatre in living memory. But beauty here serves the satire. These are bodies sculpted into commodities, draped in Katrina Lindsay’s shoulder-padded power suits and shifted around Es Devlin’s minimal catwalk stage like luxury goods on a conveyor belt. Emily Barber brings sharp comic timing to Evelyn, Bateman’s oblivious girlfriend, landing every blinkered observation about their supposedly perfect life. Tanisha Spring oozes charisma as Courtney, and Anastasia Martin’s Jean provides the production’s quietest, most affecting moments – particularly a stripped-back rendition of a Phil Collins classic that hushes the room in a way nothing else in the evening manages. Daniel Bravo is suitably punchable as rival alpha Paul Owen, and Oli Higginson delivers an eerily good impression of a certain future president in one of the show’s queasiest laughs. Kim Ismay, as Mrs Bateman, towers morally over her son in a brief but potent appearance.
The menace, though, is the production’s real achievement. Goold builds an atmosphere of creeping unease from the opening shower scene onwards that never fully releases. Lynne Page’s choreography has the ensemble moving like a wolf pack one moment and jerking through nightclub sequences the next with something distinctively The Walking Dead about them. Jon Clark’s lighting shifts between garish neon and clinical white, and the moment when Bateman and Evelyn attend Les Mis and the stage floods with theatrical sentiment is a masterstroke of ironic staging.
About that score, though. Duncan Sheik’s music is competent, occasionally atmospheric, and entirely unmemorable. The electro-pop pounding serves the world-building well enough, but across nearly three hours not a single original number lodges in the ear. The 80s covers – New Order, Tears for Fears, the Human League – do the heavy lifting, which is rather the problem. When Phil Collins is comfortably outperforming your original compositions, your songbook has an issue. Those who enjoy being bludgeoned by synth-heavy production will find plenty to admire. Those hoping to leave humming anything will be returning their video tapes empty-handed.
And then there is the ending. For two and a half hours, Goold builds a world in which Bateman’s killing crackles with genuine tension. Then the production makes its choice, firmly and finally, and the choice is both the obvious one and the wrong one. By resolving the ambiguity that made Ellis’s novel so disturbing and the 2000 film so rewatchable, the adaptation removes the very thing that gave the preceding hours their edge. It is an exit that is not worthy of the entrance. The paranoid collapse that follows feels like a soft landing where the original material demanded a hard one, and walking out into the evening, the overriding emotion is frustration at a production that spent 160 minutes earning its place among the year’s best theatre, then talked itself out of the job.
Goold’s tenure at the Almeida has been nothing short of remarkable, and this revival – his first show as artistic director revisited as his last before departing for the Old Vic – carries real emotional weight as a bookend. The show he has assembled is visually thrilling, superbly acted, and braver than almost anything else on a London stage right now. It is just a shame that its final pages let down its best chapters.