Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Playhouse Theatre **

Haydn Gwynne and Tamsin Greig in Women on the Verge

At 8.10am, I arrived outside of the Playhouse to find a fellow theatre addict already waiting. Managing to get a day ticket to a show requires dedication and patience to stand 2 hours of queuing in order to get a cheap ticket to a play or musical you would sell your soul to see. By 10am, when the box office opened, close to thirty people had braved the cold to grab a ticket to Almodóvar's classic adapted into a musical. Therefore, it makes it even more disappointing when the show is such a let-down.

Let's start with the positives. 

Performances are mostly great, especially Haydn Gwynne whose voice is delightful and whose acting makes the most of the pitiful role she is given. The set, designed by the man who made the astonishing set from Mendes' Lear at the National, is unconventional and fits the setting the musical is supposed to inhabit.

However, everything to do with the production is profoundly English. Despite the unmemorable Latin music from Yazbek and a weird chorus role given to a taxi driver, it doesn't transport you to Spain. On the contrary, whilst Greig is fantastic as always, despite the quite scarily bad singing, she is not the first choice to portray a Spanish actress and gives the production, along with the other astonishingly English actors, a quintessentially British quality which is slightly displeasing and odd when coupled with a Spanish setting. This musical does not know where it is at and, wherever it is, is not ready for the stage. Plus, a typically poor programme for the West End contains some of the worst articles I have seen which features an interview with Greig, which is just an extension of her biography, and a really misjudged article about the role of women in Almodóvar's films. 

At best, this show is merely incidental and can not be seen as anything more than that.