Gielgud Theatre

It is, to be clear, fairly nuts that leftfield European director Ivo van Hove has been allowed to plonk what I can only describe as a leftfield European musical in a big theatre in the middle of London’s glittering West End.  Presumably the calculation of producers Wessex Grove is that star Sheridan Smith offers enough commercial clout to underwrite the limited run of a show that feels almost entirely unshackled by genre niceties. But there is truly nothing else like ‘Opening Night’ in Theatreland at the moment – not even close. Like much of Belgian star Van Hove’s output, ‘Opening Night’ is a stage adaptation of a classic arthouse film, in this case John Cassavetes’s 1977 movie of the same name. It concerns the emotional disintegration of Myrtle, a famous actress struggling with alcoholism, the shocking death of a fan, and encroaching middle age – something exacerbated by her inability to connect to ‘The Second Woman’, the Broadway play she is currently rehearsing. In Van Hove’s adaptation, a camera crew is filming the play’s rehearsals – something that doesn’t have much impact on the plot (most of the dialogue is Cassavetes’s dialogue), but does offer a loose real world explanation for the director’s trademark use of live film. As with much of his oeuvre, a big screen dominates proceedings, and what it displays is at least as important as watching the actors directly; the composition of the shots matters as much as the mise en scène. Two particular shots dominate the first

This is a March 2023 review of the fifth cast of ‘2:22’. In May 2024, ‘2:22’ will return to the West End yet again for what we think is its seventh cast, for a limited run starring Stacey Dooley in her stage debut and Jenny and James Buckley reprising the role of Ben from some previous cast or other. Danny Robins’s ‘2:22’ is a bona fide West End phenomenon. It started life in the summer of 2021 as a novelty: a four-hander ghost story from the writer of the hit podcast series ‘The Battersea Poltergeist’, deployed to plug the programming gap at the Noël Coward Theatre while the musical ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ was waiting to come back post-pandemic. And Matthew Dunster’s production originally starred singer Lily Allen – an unexpected bit of casting, but not an outlandish one, given she sincerely seems to be making a move into acting. That was just the beginning, though. Since then it’s played another four West End seasons, and while I’m sure good word of mouth and the scarcity of supernatural Theatreland thrillers have played a part, it’s pretty clear that its audience has been expanded via the medium of increasingly wild casting. Last year we had stage debuts from Tom Felton – aka Harry Potter’s Draco Malfoy – and Laura ‘Love Island’ Whitmore. And this year we’re being treated to the inaugural acting performance from Cheryl, the erstwhile Girls Aloud star who seems to have left the concept of a surname somewhere in the rubble of her endlessly documented recent past.  It’s a fascinat