Not to be melodramatic about it, but everyone involved in Barcelona should be ashamed of themselves.
Well, maybe not star Lily Collins, who stays so close to her Emily in Paris comfort zone – she once again plays an adorably annoying American, blundering her way through a major European city – that you can hardly accuse her of letting the side down.
And okay, I’ll always give a pass to Lynette Linton, a brilliant and empathic director who frankly deserves a decent West End payday. She has also assembled a solid team of creatives here - when the play’s terrible story got too much for me I could at least take solace in the delicate shift of Jai Morjaria's lighting, as evening drifts from moonlight to dawn in a Barcelona apartment.
Alright, ‘ashamed’ is a bit strong: broodingly handsome middle-aged Spanish co-star Álvaro Morte undeniably plays the role of Manuel – a broodingly handsome middle-aged Spaniard – to a tee.
And look, American playwright Bess Wohl’s play isn’t ‘good’ but would probably make more sense on Broadway, in front of a US audience. Barcelona does have some reasonable points to make about American cultural insularity, as Collins’s ditsy, drunk Irene - on a hen do in the Catalan capital - hooks up with and comes back to the apartment of Morte’s Manuel, and proceeds to make an idiot out of herself via her total lack of awareness of Spanish current affairs. But to a European audience these truths are self evident, however, and Irene doesn’t feel like an audience proxy whose mistakes tell us a truth about ourselves. She just feels like an annoying American.
With crushing inevitability, secrets are divulged by both parties and their lives are changed over the course of the night.
Wohl’s last UK play was the vastly superior Camp Siegfried, a romance set at a Nazi summer camp that actually existed on Long Island pre-WW2, that was blessed with excellent performances from Patsy Ferran and Luke Thallon. Barcelona is another romantic two-hander, but without the fascinating historical conceit or the crack cast. Collins is bubbly and fluid, but she lacks the range or heft to wrangle any real pathos out of Irene’s (fairly banal) personal revelations. Morte is fine, but it feels beyond him to square the circle of Manuel being horny enough to bring Irene back, while concealing a hysterically emo secret that would surely keep him well out of ‘the mood’.
Really it’s just not good enough - everyone here has the capacity to make work better than Barcelona, so exactly why they’ve settled on a formulaic two-hander that doesn’t even feel written for a British audience is beyond me. Fans of Emily in Paris hoping for something in exactly the same ballpark are unlikely to feel actively cheated. But that’s hardly an excuse.