All About Eve
Noel Coward Theatre, London
Counting Sheep
The Vaults, London
The two trendiest production styles in UK theatre – “multimedia” and “immersive” – offer instructive new examples in London.
All About Eve, a dramatisation of the 1950 movie about a young actress who steals the career of an ageing star, is neatly contrived to draw two clienteles. Some will be the fan base of the influential Belgian director, Ivo van Hove, whose shows (Hedda Gabler, Network) disrupt familiar stories by incorporating live-captured video images on giant screens, creating a hybrid of cinema and theatre (until 11 May).
The majority will come for the casting of major screen stars: Gillian Anderson as bitchy, twitchy prima donna Margo Channing and Lily James as Eve Harrington, the ingénue whose adoration of the elder actress moves chillingly through stalking to usurpation. For the first time since Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet, there are reports of tickets on the secondary market selling for up to £1,000.
But, though feeling privileged to have got in for free, I’d advise against anyone taking out a mortgage for a seat in the stalls. The show has the lavish panache characteristic of van Hove. But whereas the dominance of video in Network made narrative sense (the setting was a TV station), here it invites a fight with a famous movie that can’t be won even by so talented a director, or actors as magnetically watchable as Anderson, James and Stanley Townsend, who plays the critic Addison DeWitt as a bullying seducer of young talent, connecting the story to the post-Weinstein world.