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This stage adaptation of Truman Capote’s classic novella announced its West End run well over a year ago. Since then it’s been trudging towards the Haymarket with a ponderous inevitability that has taken in a lengthy national tour – which the show’s West End star Pixie Lott has been sporadically attached to – and a four-week preview period, the sort of time reserved for complicated new musicals, not a well-rehearsed play with a limited 12-week run.
As you’d imagine, ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ is not very good. But it’s not a total howler, either, and if the lengthy build up has helped then fair enough.
The biggest hurdle any adaptation of the novella is that it has to surmount is the legacy of the famous 1961 film. Adaptor Richard Greenberg has done the sensible thing, and cleaved far closer to Capote’s 1943-set book than Blake Edwards’s jolly ’60s-set film. And director Nikolai Foster has cast an actress with more physical resemblance to Marilyn Monroe – Capote’s choice for the story’s enigmatic, self-invented heroine Holly Golightly – than the film’s gamine icon Audrey Hepburn.
It’s a darker story for sure, with Matt Barber’s male protagonist Fred a troubled soul, grappling with his sexuality as he falls into socialite Holly’s orbit after moving into her apartment building. But as a piece of mass entertainment, the lack of romance between him and Holly is problematic – the production feels aimless. We’re supposed to be drawn in by the riddle of who Holly really is, but I struggled to care. Lott is okay, but her blowsy, flirty, occasionally cruel Holly feels shallow and charmless, a world away from disarming kook Hepburn. Rather than a fascinating one-of-a-kind eccentric, this Holly is a faintly unpleasant hipster douche – something London is not exactly lacking in.