Theatre Review: Sheridan Smith is mesmerising as a musical star in crisis

Having survived some of the country’s toughest, shoutiest and most competitive newsrooms over the past 30 years, I wouldn’t describe myself as an unduly sensitive or cosseted soul.

There were inevitably profoundly depressing periods, but I would say that the experience I had of putting on a stage play a couple of years ago was of another order altogether. I look back on it as the most miserable period of my entire working life.

Two plays that have therefore really talked to me just lately have been the superb Ulster American – David Ireland’s brilliant take on backstage bullying and extravagant masochism that was staged at the Riverside Studios – and now Opening Night, Ivo van Hove and Rufus Wainwrights’ pitch-black musical about a stage star succumbing to a nervous breakdown.

It’s inspired by John Cassavetes’ fashionable Seventies art house film of the same name in which the actor and director’s real-life wife Gena Rowlands did her level best to cling on to sanity as she prepared for the first night of a Broadway show. It was an unforgettable performance but Sheridan Smith now more than matches it as she tries on stage to make “magic out of tragic.”

The idea of making a musical out of such a bleak subject – and what is more, investing it with the intelligence that this one has – makes for quite an unusual West End beast. The show has a superb ensemble cast – Hadley Fraser reliably brilliant as the show-within-a-show’s director – but Smith turns in a performance of such mesmerising emotional intensity and vulnerability that it makes it all worth a lot more than the sum of its parts. This is one West End star who is genuinely getting better and better with age.

I don’t generally approve of the use of film in theatre, but for once it works in this production as a camera crew follows the morose on- and off-stage protagonists around, recording in unforgiving close ups their every look of terror as opening night approaches.

If you’d like to cling on to the notion that theatre is as haplessly thrown together as it is in Noises Off – or it’s all about the cheery camaraderie of A Chorus Line, then it may be as well you keep away and nurture your delusions. This is a musical very much for the cognoscenti and not the coach parties.

Opening Night is staged at the Gielgud Theatre in London until July 27.