Theatre review: American Psycho

The Almeida will continue to have shows programmed in the Rupert Goold era running for the rest of this year, but for his final show there as director he does what Rufus Norris did when exiting the National, and revisits a hit musical he directed there just before taking on the Artistic Director job: Here that means American Psycho, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (book) and Duncan Sheik's (music and lyrics) adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' twisted satire of capitalism. Patrick Bateman (Arty Froushan) is the archetypal young Wall Street broker working in Murders and Executions (or is it Mergers and Acquisitions?) flashing the latest tech, fashions and products to show how well he's doing for himself. But for all that he's the go-to man at his firm for questions of 1980s etiquette, he always feels sure someone else is doing just that little bit better than him.

His nemesis at the moment is Paul Owen (Daniel Bravo,) who's landed the coveted Fisher Account, can get same-day reservations at the hottest restaurant in town and, most gallingly of all, never remembers Patrick's name.

So Patrick takes out his frustrations in the middle of the night, killing prostitutes and the homeless before choosing riskier victims closer to home. Apart from the black comedy of his killing spree American Psycho gets most of its laughs from the constant eighties references, and Patrick's invariably skewed opinion on the cultural phenomena that will stand the test of time: His Walkman is state-of-the-art, Tom Cruise's Cocktail is a lock-in for the Best Picture Oscar and, most famously, "Hip To Be Square" is the pinnacle of musical achievement.

Actually what amounts to lists namechecking stuff that was popular, or at least first popular, in the eighties could come across as a cheap way of getting laughs, but Sheik's music and Lynne Page's choreography are so relentlessly, effortlessly stylish (even in their own archness) that the show easily gets away with it. Es Devlin's design is a thrust stage that takes inspiration from the disused New York Subway tunnel of Bateman's favourite bar, and Katrina Lindsay's costumes mix the funny with the unsettling - the see-through, skin-coloured costumes of the ensemble near the end are a perfect example of how the production blurs the line between sexy and genuinely creepy.

The original creatives may be back but this is a thoroughly reworked show - having my review of the 2013 version to hand has helped me confirm some of the changes I spotted, like the show no longer opening with "Clean," which now only appears in its short reprises, or the coked-up Tim (Oli Higginson) not disappearing early on, but instead sticking around to be a jittery thorn in Patrick's side throughout. Patrick's fearsome mother (Kim Ismay) and slacker brother Sean (Alex James-Hatton) feel like bigger presences here, "Oh, Sri Lanka" has had its chorus completely rewritten to take out Sri Lanka and replace it with "The Death of Downtown," and it's probably no surprise that Patrick's hero-worship of Donald Trump and determination to own The Art of the Deal (but not actually read it) is much more prominent after the last decade's events.

Again reflecting recent discourse this now feels even more like a show about toxic masculinity: There is of course the way Patrick treats all women with a kind of baffled misogyny, from Emily Barber's very funny fashion victim girlfriend, to her best friend Courtney (Tanisha Spring) with whom he's having an affair, to his mousy assistant Jean (Anastasia Martin,) who he starts to think might be the perfect match for him - if only because she's the only person in his life who seems to have the slightest idea what his actual personality is.

But his equally confused reaction to the men around him is even more prominent, and it's not just when co-worker Luis (Zheng Xi Yong) gets the wrong signals from him and causes a full on Gay Panic^TM that Patrick clearly has no idea how he's supposed to fit in with other men - between this, the show once again assembling a cast filled with London's hottest Musical Theatre gays, and the short-shorts that are a wardrobe malfunction waiting to happen (sadly it didn't happen tonight,) American Psycho is somehow even more wildly homoerotic than it was the first time around. Vanessa has a tendency to cheerfully assume actors are wearing some kind of comedy muscle suit before realising it's their actual bodies; in this show that confusion extended to pretty much the entire male cast.

In the middle of this Froushan is outstanding, dripping with sweat from the effort but totally providing the focus as a character who, if it wasn't for the extreme ways he directs his frustrations, could be outright sympathetic as a little boy lost in the middle of all this testosterone-fuelled consumerism-worship. From the start his Patrick is visibly more a collection of neuroses than a human being, something that washes right over everyone but Jean just like nobody actually pays attention to his constant, outright confessions of multiple murder and torture. Froushan's so distractingly handsome and charming it could be implausible that he would be like this, but then the whole point is that so is everyone around him: If he looks right everyone can happily ignore literally everything he says and does, and while Paul might be the only one who actively confuses him with someone else, the rest of the characters also treat him as one of the interchangeable yuppies surrounding him.

The 2013 production never got its rumoured West End transfer after a failed attempt to conquer Broadway (Gooldilocks might have learned a lot of things in his decade plus at the Almeida, but the fact that however popular he might be in London, New York fucking hates him doesn't seem to be one of them.) This production feels bigger, not just in the size of the stage and ensemble but in its confidence and ambition, so maybe plans are for that further life to finally happen. Dark, outrageous fun, it definitely feels like it should get to capitalise on its sold-out run this time around.

American Psycho by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, Duncan Sheik, Roland Orzabal, Ian Stanley, Chris Hughes, Your Mum, Gillian Gilbert, Stephen Hague, Peter Hook, Stephen Morris, Bernard Sumner, Phil Collins, Bill Gibson, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Judah and his brothers, Sean Hopper, Huey Lewis, Jo Callis, Philip Oakey and Philip Adrian Wright is booking until the 21st of March at the Almeida Theatre (returns only.)

Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.