Emily in Paris becomes Lily in London. Or to be even more precise, Irene in Barcelona, as Lily Collins, star of the lovably daft Netflix smash hit, makes her stage debut in Bess Wohl’s grippingly classy two-hander about an American woman on a “bachelorette weekend” in Spain. These are among the best 90 minutes of theatre I have seen all year and the applause at the play’s end went on for so long that Collins began to look bashfully embarrassed.
With her trailing blonde hair and sparkly silver jumpsuit – Irene is another fashionable American in Europe – she stumbles into the “muy lindo” apartment of older Spanish man Manuel (Money Heist star Álvaro Morte), whom she has met in a bar. Irene is playful, skittish and drunk and Manuel – or Manolo, as she keeps calling him – is keen to move things into the bedroom. Tiny wrinkles of doubt begin to creep in, for us as well as Irene: why don’t the flat’s taps work? And why does Manuel keep glancing anxiously out of the window?
It says much about us – as human beings, as well as consumers of culture in which attractive women traditionally don’t fare too well in strangers’ apartments – that we are poised for the mood to turn and for something bad to happen to Irene. It doesn’t, but this is the sort of rare and delicious piece about which the fewer details we know in advance the better, so as to savour the mercurially shifting tone as it unfolds.
This is a remarkable stage debut from Collins, conveying a fascinating blend of interlayered weakness and strength. Irene’s giddy gabbling cover – ever less expertly – deep whirlpools of uncertainty and Morte’s Manuel becomes impatient with the lies she is so obviously telling herself. Yet the self-deception is by no means all one way and the suave Spaniard is edged into a reckoning with his own past.
Barcelona works splendidly because every element is akin to peeling the layers of a very large onion. Frankie Bradshaw’s design, chic and bijou on the surface, begins to offer unsettling clues the longer we study it. Director Lynette Linton is at the top of her game with a piece that offers no scene changes, exits or entrances to alter the mood. There is immaculate shading and pacing as the late night edges into early morning and both Irene and Manuel realise they have crucial decisions to make. Wohl’s script maintains a light touch while encompassing the hefty geopolitical theme of America’s self-assumed position of global superiority.
It’s rare that a play induces in its audience a reverential hush of concentration, with several hundred spectators seeming to sit without the slightest shuffling and hold their breath anxiously as the drama unfolds. This is the special sort of thrill that only live theatre can offer and Barcelona does so triumphantly.
To 11 January (barcelonatheplay.com)