‘Opening Night’ review – Sheridan Smith salvages a solid performance from Ivo van Hove’s exhausting hodgepodge

How the bloody hell can Ivo van Hove go from his very best a la A Little Life, to his very worst in the form of Opening Night? Dry in plot, cluttered in its staging and musically incongruous in Rufus Wainwright’s jolty numbers, we can at least finally sympathise and connect with Sheridan Smith’s character in the musical’s final scenes. She’s drunk, exhausted and unbothered, dragged towards the finishing line (that is, the ‘opening night’ of a play she’s in) by the company and creative team – similar to us, in a way, albeit without the luxury of a stiff drink.

It’s meta theatre, people! Van Hove’s area of expertise! Once again picking a film and moving it into this middle ground of videography and theatre (although in this production it’s not exactly a 50:50 split – more on that later), the Belgian director dives into the 1977 film by John Cassavetes about a troubled actor trying to persevere to the opening of The Second Woman – yes, the one Ruth Wilson did over and over for a marathon 24 hours last year – when the play evokes big existential questions within her. The play within a play about the workings of theatre is akin to The Motive and the Cue, except while Mendes’ production mimics the Hamlet at its centre and ripens as it progresses, Opening Night does the opposite, and both the director in the play (the sexist and vicious Manny, played by Hadley Fraser) and van Hove struggle to invigorate the material with which they are presented.

Van Hove overpopulates scenes with characters to the extent you’re having to scour the stage to figure out who’s talking, when even the overbearing and distracting video design at the back of the stage is unable to give us the answer. Camera shots often focus on the wrong character during dialogue, aerial footage elicits nothing from the acting on stage, and rare instances where the cameras are turned off (such as a bizarre Hamilton-esque rap battle of artistic differences between Smith’s Myrtle and Nicola Hughes’ playwright Sarah) carry no extra weight by being different from the rest. In earlier scenes, there is the faintest hope that the freeze-framed Smith on the big screen is Myrtle ‘putting on a face’ to hide her crumbling psyche, only for this to dissipate with the over-reliance on the videography.

Even if you were to take a break from the screen, Jan Versweyveld’s dull, bare and uninteresting set (a cross between All About Eve with the dressing room at the back, and The Damned with its plain orange flooring at the front) is either vacuous with few actors on it, or disorienting and crowded with too many of them to look at. It’s tiring – all the more so when Wainwright’s music (spanning grunge, operatic, bossa nova, folk and more) often flips genres mid-number, so pronounced in its presentation that it captures our attention in implying something dramatic, which ultimately never surfaces. Lyrically, it’s just as pointed, with Smith’s Myrtle asserting that her character Virginia is “still a somebody” in one number, and singing that her “heart is open” towards the end. It neglects the basic rule of ‘show, don’t tell’.

In fact, being brutally honest, half of the company doesn’t even need to be there. Indeed, all the male characters are needlessly unlikeable – putting that politely (I’ll refrain from using explicit language to describe some of the dialogue they’re afforded). The aforementioned Manny relishes in disparaging wife Dorothee (Amy Lennox), on whom he later cheats, while producer David (John Marquez) appears supportive at first in Myrtle’s lowest moments, only for it emerge that this was building up to him trying to get with her. His character arc pretty much ends when Myrtle doesn’t reciprocate. All the men here are either manipulative, misogynistic or framed only through the lens of their relationships with women. It’s bleak and unnerving to watch.

But arguably the finest embodiment of a pointless character is Nancy (Shira Haas). I mean, sure, as the teenage fangirl who dies in a car accident outside stage door, she plays an integral role in triggering Myrtle’s crisis over aging, but when she moves over into the afterlife as this restless ghost haunting our protagonist, Nancy becomes this spirit who bathes in creepy intimacy with Myrtle. We know the latter sees the former as a younger version of herself – van Hove’s on-the-nose dialogue (the kind which has the play’s opening line being the protagonist saying “I want to be loved”, and has her lay out her motivations and frustrations in the open rather than conveying these with subtlety) tells us as such – and that gives us the slightest semblance of a premise to this musical about aging, but this arc feels so insignificant amid everything else going on and the expanse that is Versweyveld’s set that I didn’t really understand the internalised conflict with which Myrtle is dealing. It’s not clear exactly why she feels the need to bastardise Sarah’s script beyond this abstract need to be ‘free’ on stage, even when we don’t really know what’s holding her back, and so I don’t care for her much.

I watch on praying some big epiphany or realisation occurs within Myrtle which brings about a change of character or understanding about growing old which gets her to curtain call, but that doesn’t happen, and instead both her and fellow actor Maurice (Benjamin Walker) literally blow raspberries in our face for thinking as such. When the issue of her being haunted by Nancy is finally dealt with (I’m being vague here so as to avoid spoilers – not that you should see this anyway), I understood this as her doing away with her younger self and embracing middle age, but there’s nothing to indicate exactly what’s brought about this sudden acceptance. She has closure, but the audience most definitely do not. As the pair perform The Second Woman in the closing scene, they discuss how “there’s an answer to every problem” – it’s one of many lines, up there with “I don’t care what the critics say”, which carry a whole new, painful meaning when watching as an audience member.

If you’re looking for positives, then Smith does well with what’s she’s given, managing to navigate the erratic and sporadic music from Wainwright and emphasise the relevant dialogue from van Hove. Hughes gives an impressive performance at the end of Act One as a devastated Sarah watching her work fall apart, even when it is the most outlandish conclusion before an interval. Ultimately, though, you have to dig deep to find any sense of character development in Opening Night, and search just as hard to find something to enjoy. There is, sadly, nothing entertaining about this mess of a musical.

★

Opening Night is now playing at the Gielgud Theatre until 18 May. Signed, audio described and captioned performances are scheduled for 20 April, 27 April and 4 May respectively.

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Production Images: Jan Versweyveld.