Ruth Leon’s Pocket Theatre Reviews

NEXT TO NORMAL – Wyndham’s Theatre

When this landmark musical debuted on Broadway in 2010, it won three Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama – one of only ten musicals in history to receive this prestigious honour. It deserves every accolade it has received. Now, this excellent show has transferred its Donmar production to Wyndhams, allowing audiences who haven’t seen it before to appreciate how lucky we are to have the breadth of theatre experience in London.

In 2008, when Next To Normal, Brian Yorkey’s unflinching play about mental illness first surfaced off-Broadway, it was not customary to treat bi-polar disorder and the way it can ripple out from the patient to the family and further to the world around it quite so shockingly.

But beware. Anyone who has suffered from this terrible condition themselves or has witnessed it in someone they love, will be knocked over by this play’s willingness to expose what happens to a nice middle-class family when mental illness strikes.

Enough to say that Next to Normal, with its brilliant performances from every member of the cast, engaging songs that these performers can actually sing, and in-your-face facts about an illness that is more prevalent than we realise, is unmissable.

VISIT FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN – Hampstead Theatre

The prolific and erudite playwright and director Christopher Hampton has adapted this short story by Stefan Zweig into an absorbing play for Hampstead. Absorbing, yes, but perhaps not entirely successful, being primarily a setting for a long monologue by one of the two main characters.

A successful writer, who I immediately assumed to be Zweig’s alter ego, is confronted by a woman who, at first, he doesn’t recognise but for whom he has been so important that she has stalked him for her entire life. She is the Unknown Woman of the title and the body of the play is the story of her obsession with this man who is unaware and uncaring of her existence until it is too late.

The whole play smacks to me of a mea culpa by Zweig, feeling desperately guilty about his carelessness in not recognising the commitment of another person.

How he gets there is interesting but, finally, it remains a short story, lacking perhaps the significance that Chelsea Walker’s excellent production gives it. The action is made more intriguing by a silent ghostly woman from the writer’s imagination haunting the otherwise spare action.

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