Plaza Suite, Savoy Theatre, review: Sarah Jessica Parker’s West End debut is a wallet-busting treat
Sarah Jessica Parker has bided her time, and then some, before making her West End debut. It’s 25 years since we went mad for Sex and the City, in which she played the candid, adventurous New York sex columnist Carrie Bradshaw.
Finally we get to see her in the flesh, treading the boards in a hotel-set comedy, fittingly staged at the Savoy. Against the expectations established by her profile, this is a sexually inhibited Neil Simon hit from an earlier generation – a 1968 period piece in which the freedom of Bradshaw and her cohort was in embryo and, still pertinently, marriage was an almost inescapable fact of life.
In the midst of old-world New York opulence lurk harsh home truths about relationships; the same deluxe hotel suite gets successively inhabited by three sets of unhappy mid-lifers. Simon (who died in 2018) peeks in with an amused eye, though, favouring light over shade. Parker is starring opposite her real-life husband Matthew Broderick so what the duo bring to the table as acting pros, playing all of the three pairings, is augmented, in teasing theory, by a marital bond that goes back to 1997.
That combination is one reason why this is such a hot ticket, commanding astronomical prices (up to ￡395). The blunt truth, however, is that Broderick was here a few years ago in The Starry Messenger. The public appetite for this show, which has extended its run, stems greatly from Parker’s presence.
While it might be a stretch to say she’s worth every penny of the full price, she’s terrific entertainment value. Making her entrance to a round of applause she sets to work emanating a fretful optimism as Karen, who has checked into Room 719 to celebrate her wedding anniversary in the same suite she and her husband honeymooned in. But her deadbeat spouse Sam extracts the fizz from her bubbling nostalgia, contradicting the innumerate Karen on the specifics of their nuptials and making his excuses to head back to the office to go through some figures with his attentive younger secretary.
Parker offers immaculate room-service as she delivers polished rounds of rueful wisecracks, but her crestfallen air speaks volumes as she flits between adjoining living-room and desolate bedroom like a bird in a cage. Perhaps the claws could come out more – compared to Walter Matthau in the film version, grouchy and irascible, Broderick cuts a more stiff-necked and restrained figure, placid and plodding. But given they’ve had ages to bed in their performances (John Benjamin Hickey’s production ran on Broadway in 2022), that understatement must be a calculated reflection of how little an entitled man could, and can, give while his other half does all the emotional labour.
Besides, after the interval, things get more wildly, sketchily silly. Broderick is creepily amusing as Jesse Kiplinger, a thrice-divorced Hollywood producer trying to woo, with vodka and clumsy overtures, a hitched but plainly unhappy hometown flame – who’s gratingly smitten with his starry lifestyle (Parker is a droll model of tactical fluttering innocence). He looks a risible sight in his roll-neck sweater, check trousers and shiny shoes that have him sliding all over the place. And finally he winds up looking a fright in the third act, unravelling with farcical precision as Mr Hubley, the exasperated father of a refusenik bride, who’s hiding out in the bathroom as the minutes tick past the anointed wedding hour.
It’ll be hard to forget the sight of Parker’s fussing, flamboyantly overdressed Mrs Hubley clinging to his shredded coat-tails and being towed behind him as he steams towards the obstinately bolted door like a demented bull. And the image sums up what Simon says, so simply, about marriage. A wallet-busting treat.
Until April 13. Tickets: plazasuiteuk.com
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