Review Roundup: Lily Collins and Álvaro Morte Open in BARCELONA

Late night in Barcelona. An American tourist goes home with a handsome Spaniard. What begins as a carefree, one-night stand becomes an invitation to danger, as the personal and political catastrophically intertwine.

With star turns from Lily Collins (Emily in Paris, To The Bone, Mank) and Álvaro Morte (Money Heist, Wheel of Time, Immaculate), Lynette Linton directs the West End premiere of Bess Wohl’s explosive play - running for 12 weeks only at London’s Duke of York’s Theatre.

What did the critics think?

Photo Credit: Manuel Harlan

Aliya Al-Hassan, BroadwayWorld: The ill-advised hook-up that quickly stutters and the couple's arguments feel authentic; shouting over each other, voices and frustrations rising higher and higher. There are twists in the tale; some obvious, some less so. But overall, the production fails to rise above feeling contrived: it doesn't ring true that Manuel fails to ask Irene to leave as soon he tires of her and it also seems odd that Irene herself would run to the door, but not actually leave when things take on a more sinister tone.

Olivia Rook, London Theatre: While this run marks Barcelona’s UK premiere, the play had its first outing in 2013 and is set in 2009. Debates about Iraq and terror attacks, while relevant later in the play, feel forced, as do Irene’s repeated discussions around her ancestors’ pioneer history and the huge cultural gulf between Americans and Europeans. Wohl’s play truly sings when she hits us with some big revelations and these two strangers are shown not to be so dissimilar after all — each struggling with their own demons, in need of another to show them the way out of the darkness.

Chris Wiegand, The Guardian: In Lynette Linton’s production neither the suspense nor the humour hit home, the mix often more awkward than unsettling. The biggest in a handful of plot revelations lacks emotional impact and does not so much shed light on earlier events as render them distractingly implausible. Given the considerable creative talent involved, this is a curiously flat affair, feeling longer than its interval-free 90 minutes, with little sense of these strangers being transformed by a shared experience.

Clive Davis, The Times: The drama, which had its premiere in the US in 2013, is set soon after the election of Barack Obama, giving Wohl an opportunity to indulge in some tired sparring about American parochialism and European worldliness. Irene is a woefully ignorant estate agent from Denver who thinks everything is “cute”. On a rowdy bachelorette party, she picks up the older, enigmatic Manuel who takes her back to an apartment littered with house-moving boxes. There’s an explosion of tipsy, erotic energy at first. Then secrets slowly rise to the surface as Lynette Linton’s production ticks along. Jai Morjaria’s subdued lighting casts shadows in the set designer Frankie Bradshaw’s domestic interior.

Sarah Crompton, WhatsOnStage: Collins is a revelation, as lively as she is as Emily, yet with a lovely capacity for stillness; as she listens to Manuel talk about love, she becomes becalmed, her shifting from foot to foot stopping as she becomes first enthralled and then appalled by what he is saying. When she talks about “the wedding industrial complex”, she manages to mix dreaminess and despair, the sense of a Denver girl clinging to her illusions with a harder-nosed realisation that they may be fake.

Claire Alfree, The Telegraph: Collins really is good as Irene, radiating effervescent naivety and as giddy as a pony while finding the vulnerability in a sheltered 35-year-old who has never found the strength to challenge her own life choices. Complicating facts emerge: Manuel has a wife with whom he is estranged; she is about to marry an upright morality freak back home in Denver who comes from the same corn-fed, pioneer Christian stock as she does but whom, she manages to admit to herself for the first time, she doesn’t love. There is a lovely delicate poignancy to her admission that her favourite thing to do is steal into the houses she sells as part of her job in real estate and pretend for an afternoon another life is hers.

Fiona Mountford, iNews: It says much about us – as human beings, as well as consumers of culture in which attractive women traditionally don’t fare too well in strangers’ apartments – that we are poised for the mood to turn and for something bad to happen to Irene. It doesn’t, but this is the sort of rare and delicious piece about which the fewer details we know in advance the better, so as to savour the mercurially shifting tone as it unfolds.

Nick Curtis, The Standard: What’s keeping these two people in this room apart from the playwright’s need to generate conflict? There’s some confusion too over their ages. The doll-like Collins looks deliberately young, though actually playing her age: Manuel should surely be older. Again, weird. I think there’s a subtextual strand about the way large-scale, domestic terror atrocities have changed America, but I didn’t buy it.

Adam Bloodworth, City A.M.: It isn’t just Wohl’s script that feels anodyne: the timing for tense arguments is off, meaning language sometimes crescendos unnaturally, making disagreements between the pair feel forced. There are also issues with the structure: when Lily Collins’ Irene runs for the door halfway through the show, Manuel begs her not to leave, but Irene is so irritating that you don’t believe him. When the script does finally start to heat up like a Barcelona morning, the twist is too gentle to rouse more than a cursory interest.

Tom Wicker, The Stage: This is an infuriating play. It’s packed with plot contrivances that see it spinning its wheels to audience patience-testing effect, in service of a final-act reveal. As Irene once again fails to exit the apartment for seemingly no good reason, you want to shout: “Why don’t you just leave?” Wohl’s constant withholding of information results in a strained, artificial tone. In spite of Linton’s directorial scaffolding, the writing isn’t strong enough to make us invest in these characters before we get to the genuinely moving point of the story.

Sarah Hemming, Financial Times: Collins, in her stage debut, is a mercurial figure, zigzagging about like a butterfly, both physically and emotionally. Wohl gives Irene some great lines, which Collins delivers wittily: “I rely on other people not to sink to my level,” she says, admitting that what she is doing is screwed up. She’s never still, while Morte, in reply, has a quiet, contained quality. When they finally unpack their feelings, it’s clear that her restlessness and his stillness have to do with their unhappiness. But in the end, despite its thrust, this feels like a curiously flimsy affair.

Average Rating: 58.2%