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 cards scene is present and correct) and meaningless relationships.
After an intro in which Bateman bombastically asserts his alpha status, it’s really downhill for him. An encounter with his nemesis Paul Owen (Daniel Bravo) – a man who does vacuous performative masculinity better, sharper, with more conviction than Bateman – sends him into a spin. If Bateman can’t be best at being an awful ‘80s guy, then what is the point to him? Froushan’s sweaty, frantic performance is a study in pure anxiety: he wants out of his whole ghastly life but doesn’t quite realise it, unable to see the things that actually make him happy – a trip to Les Misérables that he finds unexpectedly moving; his good-hearted, self-effacing secretary Jean (Anastasia Martin).
Obviously it’s hard to get away from the fact that Bateman sadistically murders a lot of people. There’s always been debate over whether it’s all in his head or not (even Ellis says he doesn’t know). But you can’t do American Psycho without this being at least a very distinct possibility.
It struck me that there’s a sort of incel analogue here: a young, lost man, alienated from society, driven to extremes of misanthropic thought, his toxic fantasies not too dissimilar from what you’ll find in corners of Twitter. And his vocal (if confused) admiration for one Donald Trump does give the original story a bleakly amusing note of contemporaneity.
Does this all make for a good musical? I mean, it makes for a good cult musical. But for all the demonic razzle dazzle that Goold and his top-notch creative team bring to bear – disturbingly twitchy choreography, infernal monochrome elegance, a lot of indoor sunglass wearing – American Psycho is a deadpan show with a downbeat story that sometimes feels in conflict with the maximalist nature of musical theatre. And in humanising Bateman and stressing his anxieties, his collapse into full-blown paranoia at the end feels less momentous than in book and film.
Goold’s stewardship of the Almeida saw endless wildly unlikely plays transfer to the West End, while I’m fairly sure literally none of the musicals he staged did so. But that’s not to say that weren’t important. American Psycho is hardly obtusely arty but it has a fearless to it that simply means it eschews most of the bells and whistles of the commercial musical. Arch, introspective, and also about a guy who sadistically murders homeless people, it’s as singular as anything Goold ever staged here, and a worthy bookend to the greatest London artistic directorship of recent times.
