Lily Collins and Álvaro Morte may be star casting but Barcelona is a poorly written and conceived vehicle for them at the Duke of York’s Theatre
“I never do this!”
It’s tempting to consider that the bio-writer for Lily Collins is over-compensating just a little as she makes her stage debut in Barcelona. A “Golden Globe nominated actress, author, and philanthropist and one of Hollywood’s most sought-after actresses”, she’s best known for Emily in Paris and that’s fine, just own it. Her co-star Álvaro Morte also has major Netflix TV credentials, having starred as the hugely seductive El Profesor in La Casa de Papel (Money Heist) amongst many other things and these are the kind of names needed, in this day and age, to launch a new(ish) play cold into the West End.
Beth Wohl’s two-hander dates back to 2013 and it is hard not to think it should have been left there. Collins plays Irene, the archetypal American abroad, vacationing in Catalonia and hooking up this night with the handsome Manolo (Morte). Except he’s not called Manolo as she keeps misremembering, he’s Manuel, and the flat he has brought her back to isn’t actually his…. And as her blasé pronouncements on US exceptionalism bring up the war on terror, his mask slips as he replies by reminding her about the reprisal attacks on Madrid in 2004.
The suggestion is that Wohl is going to have something interesting about the geopolitical state of the world but that really isn’t the case here. The 2009 setting doesn’t help, it speaks so intrinsically to that time that in this fast-changing world, we’re several pages on now. But it doesn’t even really feel like it would have had anything profound to say then either. There’s smug satisfaction in its US-centric worldview (whether its being satirised or not) and a horrible reliance on the delayed withholding of crucial information – which is more often than not telegraphed way in advance – and the result feels terribly contrived and thoroughly uncredible.
It’s a bit of a surprise to see Lynette Linton on directorial duties here, her usually sure touch unable to do much with the paucity of this material, the atmospheric touches from Jai Morjaria’s lighting and Gino Ricardo Green’s video only able to add so much. Collins make as accomplished a debut as possible with so irritatingly drawn a character as Irene but Morte comes close to salvaging the whole enterprise by layering in so much empathy into (at least his half of) the revelations. I’d much rather see a Canadian play….
