THE WEST END COMES BACK TO LIFE
Immersive LDN, 56 Davies Street, London W1 (immersivegatsby.com). Until 31 December Running time: 2hrs 30mins
Earlier this month, the 41 theatres that make up Broadway announced they would remain dark until at least May 2021, said Alex Marshall in The New York Times. In London, however, there are signs of a theatrical reawakening. Last week, the Apollo on Shaftesbury Avenue became the first West End house to reopen its doors, for a stage version of Adam Kay’s “inordinately popular doctoring diary” This Is Going
to Hurt, said Brian Logan in The Guardian. The audience were socially distanced and masked, and even onstage the medic-turned-comic Kay wore PPE. “If pubs are safe, this was safe. Which is just as well: contracting a fatal virus at a show about the NHS would be too ironic even for stand-up comedy.”
Three big West End shows have announced November restart dates, said the London Evening Standard. Everybody’s Talking
About Jamie (at the Apollo); Six the Musical (at the Lyric) and
The Play That Goes Wrong (at the Duchess) are the trailblazers reopening in coming weeks. On the South Bank, the National Theatre has just restarted performances in its largest auditorium, the Olivier, with Delroy, a sequel to Roy Williams and Clint Dyer’s earlier hit Death of England. The National’s first ever pantomime, Dick Whittington, follows in December. Over in
Mayfair last week, the immersive Great Gatsby became the first long-running London show to welcome back audiences, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. Attending this “energised” evening is like “stumbling across a discotheque in a desert”. Outside, empty pavements and Tube platforms “look like harbingers of a Great Depression”. Inside “the joint is jumping like a needle stuck in a Roaring Twenties groove”.
The Prohibition-era setting of
The Great Gatsby brings an “appropriately illicit” feel to an immersive theatrical event in the age of Covid, said Rachel Halliburton on The Arts Desk. But is the “transcendent euphoria” of the production compromised by the need for social distancing? Inevitably, a little. Yet there is still “a joy and a spark” to this “warm and electric” evening. The cast do a fantastic job, said Alex Wood on What’s On Stage. They react to the audience “while always maintaining that quintessential 1920s charm”; they also help to “usher, guide and maintain distances” where needed. For me, the highlight was being whisked away (with three other masked audience members) to witness an anguished yet “beautiful” monologue from Lucinda Turner as Daisy Buchanan. It was a perfect illustration of “why the magic of live theatre will never be diminished”.