REVIEW: How to Make a Mess, Upstairs at The Gatehouse
Great voices and fun moments but musical love letter to Nigella Lawson doesn't fully deliver
Nigella, the musical — what the theatre world has been begging for. Not.
First, the positives. This ambitious two-hander show features Natasha Karp as the “can’t cook, won’t cook” recently bereaved Anna, and Tanya Truman as the voluptuous Nigella lookalike, whose life lessons include an ode to roast chicken as a cure for many ills.
Both women have really good voices to interpret the book, music and lyrics by Emily Rose Simons. All three women are Jewish and the show is sprinkled with nods to the Jewish way of life and death, perhaps unexpected to a first-night audience — the cutting of a garment to indicate a mourner, the references to the shiva week and the instruction that mourners should sit on low chairs near the ground. There is also the somewhat improbable “wish you long life” from Nigella — who is said to be profoundly secular in real life.
And there is the delicious in-joke of the production itself, set as it is in a London kitchen with apparently bare cupboards when the show opens, while Christianna Mason, the set and costume designer, magically fills the fridge and store cupboards with must-have ingredients as the show progresses. How I longed for a fridge like that.
Nigella, as portrayed by Tanya Truman, is suitably voluptuous, caressing dialogue and lyrics with innuendo. Natasha Karp’s unhappy Anna has a fine line in scowling, but did make me laugh when attempting to broach a much-needed bottle of wine and discovering that, as usual, it was not a screw-top opening.
But… how to make a mess is an unfortunately apposite title. It not only refers to a genuine physical mess at the end of the first act, when eggs and chairs are flung with therapeutic anger by Anna, who simply doesn’t see the point of cooking from scratch when there is takeaway round the corner. It also, to my mind, seems to highlight a show which doesn’t really know where it’s going. For me, 10 songs in the first act, none of them memorable, were several songs too many, despite one audience member pointedly reminding me at the interval that “it is a musical, you know”. Very well, but Sondheim this ain’t.
The central line appears to be — based on Lawson’s first groundbreaking book, How to Eat — that you can’t fully find yourself or love yourself unless you can enjoy food. She tells us: “Although it’s possible to love eating without being able to cook, I don’t believe you can ever really cook unless you love eating.” That’s a rationale which can’t really be sustained for more than two hours.
Wisely, the producers state in the programme that “this production is not endorsed by (and has no direct involvement from) Nigella Lawson or her team at this stage”. My guess is that they hope that the Domestic Goddess herself will bless the show.
How to Make a Mess runs at Upstairs at the Gatehouse until June 28.
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