American Psycho
Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel American Psycho is very specifically a satire on late ’80s Manhattan yuppie culture. And yet the book’s murderous banker protagonist Patrick Bateman is transcendent of the decade he was written into. He’s timeless, a folk figure, shorthand for empathy-free consumer capitalist narcissism. If you describe somebody as ’a real Patrick Bateman’, you probably don’t mean they’re bang into Huey Lewis and the News.
There are a few period chuckles at the start of Duncan Sheik and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s musical, which returns to the Almeida as Rupert Goold’s final production as artistic director, having been his first back in 2013. Arty Froushan’s Bateman is very proud of his anachronistic gadgets, notably his Sony Walkman and his 30-inch Toshiba TV. The score is unabashedly ‘80s, mixing retro electro pop original songs with a smattering of classic covers (New Order, Tears for Fears, etc).
But even so, before long it starts to feel alarmingly current. It’s fascinating how different Froushan’s Bateman is to Matt Smith’s deadpan, dead-eyed take from 2013. They’re very different actors, for sure. But it’s more than that.
Put simply, this Bateman is kind of sympathetic. A bit. Less vile than the book version, less an out-and-out whack job than Christian Bale in the film, more of an inner life than Smith’s take. Really, he’s a young man trying desperately to fit into a ghastly world of meaningless jobs, meaningless status symbols (the infamous business...