American Psycho review, Almeida Theatre – The grimmest musical to darken London’s stages in years returns with aplomb

Two bloodied female bodies are draped over a sofa, their elegantly stockinged legs twitching disconcertingly to a pulsing electronic score. It’s a crime scene, but it feels jarringly stylish – like a fashion show in an abattoir. And that cognitive dissonance is typical of the grimmest musical to darken the London stage in years. Studded with retro numbers by Duncan Sheik (Spring Awakening), this take on Brett Easton Ellis’s novel first bewildered and thrilled audiences at the Almeida Theatre 12 years ago. Now, artistic director Rupert Goold is bringing it back from the dead to finish his reign with undeniable style.

Ellis’s novel is a tough read, dragging readers into the relentlessly image-obsessed, petty, violent mind of its protagonist Patrick Bateman; Goold's production smoothes away its rough edges and replaces them with a high surface sheen. Superstar designer Es Devlin went on to design stages for Beyoncé after first working on American Psycho, so there's been a bit of a step up in ambition – here, she turns the Almeida into a glitzy, minimal evocation of a fashionable 1980s New York nightclub, with a vast LED floor acting as a catwalk for a gorgeously attired cast to strut over through flashes of distorted video and strobe light.

The only thing that isn’t slick and shiny about this production is its protagonist. Arty Froushan gives a gawky, surprisingly likeable take on the novel’s Wall Street banker-cum-killer: his suit is forever rumpled, drenched in the sweat that comes from trying to keep up with fickle trends in business cards or dining establishments. He’s desperate to land the coveted Fisher account, but his far slicker rival Paul Owen (the oh-so-suave Daniel Bravo) has beaten him to it. Meanwhile he is obsessed with his saintly secretary Jean (Anastasia Martin) and exhausted by his girlfriend Evelyn (an engagingly nervy Emily Barber), who’s hilariously willing to overlook his emergent murderous tendencies in pursuit of a bit of finger candy. His inner monologue is played for laughs – the audience chuckles knowingly as he brags about his top-of-the-range Toshiba TV, or boasts of eating repulsive sounding dishes like sashimi with goat’s cheese. When he meets Donald Trump in a lift (in a prescient episode from the original novel) he becomes a blushing fanboy. Aspiration never looked so cringe.

Goold’s production skates the edge of 1980s kitsch, and sometimes Sheik’s songs tip into it. It feels like he had a Filofax of key themes to cover (fashion; business cards; the Hamptons), each of which gets its own glib little number. There’s none of the psychological richness of Spring Awakening here. Instead, gorgeous new arrangements of 1980s bangers from Bateman’s Walkman playlist heighten the mood: “In The Air Tonight” brings out all the lightly buried menace in Phil Collins’s song.

Still, Sheik’s score belatedly bares its dark heart in the second act, with the video game-style bleeps of “Killing Spree”, the spine-tingling liturgical harmonies of “Clean” and the brooding nihilism of the torch song finale, “This Is Not An Exit”.

“I simply don't exist,” sings Bateman, casting doubt on all the murder and mess that has gone before. Was any of it real? Ellis’s book leaves it ambiguous, and Goold’s version leans even further into the idea of Bateman being a lost fantasist. Lynne Page’s stellar choreography turns his murder scenes into journeys through fantastical psychological landscapes, shaped by mounds of writhing bodies.

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Coupled with the likability of this show’s protagonist, this dream-like feel means this show’s ending lands a bit strangely. Are Bateman’s violent, misogynist fantasies of dismembering largely female bodies really just an understandable response to the pains of late capitalism? He might be a loser, but it’s the women who really lose out.

Still, if this show’s message is uncertain, its impact is undeniable. It doesn’t look or sound like any other musical you'll see in London, and there’s something entrancing about this icy injection of nihilism into a remorselessly peppy genre.

‘American Psycho’ runs at the Almeida Theatre until 14 March