Theatre review: Beautiful Little Fool

I'm pretty convinced we're only a few years away from the point where all the new work ever produced will be some kind of adaptation of The Great Gatsby, but until then Hannah Corneau (music and lyrics) and Mona Mansour (book) give us its writer, and the woman whose contribution to it we're led to consider might be larger than we thought. F. Scott (David Hunter) and Zelda Fitzgerald (Amy Parker) were known for their hard-drinking party lifestyle and both died young - the story is narrated by their daughter Scottie (Lauren Ward,) who's just turned 48 and thereby outlived both her parents. At an archive dedicated to their work Scottie goes through records, diary entries and letters that bring her parents back to life and reveal the side of them she had never quite realised was there under the self-obsessed façades and histrionics.

Meeting more or less by chance when they were both very young, they reunited after the First World War and moved to New York where they enjoyed some success as writers, but never anything like the popularity Fscott's most famous novel would achieve after his death.

Michael Greif's production has a great two-level set design from Shankho Chaudhuri, but Ben Stanton's lighting shines directly into the audience's eyes during an early number about the couple's famous parties, meaning I had to look away from the entirety of the show's engagement with this vibrant if destructive element of their lives. Which leaves us with my disliked trope of a show that asks us to follow a relationship falling apart, without first giving us a reason to invest in it: Zelda soon tires of Fscott hogging the limelight while he tires of her extravagant spending of money they don't have.

It constantly feels like Corneau and Mansour are trying to make this a show about rehabilitating Zelda's reputation as a talent in her own right: There's an early thread about how the pair co-wrote a lot of early work but only Fscott was credited, but this fizzles out just when we think it might raise questions about Zelda's contributions to his more famous works. We also don't get a lot of insight into her famous mental health issues, and I was left wanting some digging into whether it was in fact a case of a woman being medically pacified for behaving in a more spirited way than the men would like. Right at the end Scottie asks us to consider it the latter, but at this point it's telling when it should have been showing all along.

Similarly she ends by realising her parents genuinely loved both each other and her, something you'd think the scenes we've just watched might have got around to showing us: Ward is generally very good but it's a bit of a thankless task to have to keep telling us the conclusions the story itself never really reached. The songs to me were an indistinguishable collection of rock ballads that felt like spending 100 minutes in the closing moments of Rent, so all in all Beautiful Little Fool never came close to sparking to life.

Beautiful Little Fool by Hannah Corneau and Mona Mansour is booking until the 28th of February at Southwark Playhouse Borough's Large.

Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Pamela Raith.