Barcelona
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
