Beautiful Little Fool – Southwark Playhouse Borough

Picture: Pamela Raith

Beautiful Little Fool continues at Southwark Playhouse Borough, London until 28 February 2026.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

Musical theatre fans are no strangers to the works of F Scott Fitzgerald, especially with The Great Gatsby’s London residency last year. These days, the writer’s life is less well-known. In their day, though, Scott and his wife Zelda were the partying couple of the Roaring Twenties.

Beautiful Little Fool presents the couple’s life through the eyes of their now-adult daughter, Frances Scott Fitzgerald, also known as ‘Scottie’. Lauren Ward exudes a slightly melancholy air as she maintains the F Scott Fitzgerald Archive, a beautiful shelf-based set by Shankho Chaudhuri that suggests a cluttered, disorganised life.

Among these artefacts, Ward’s Scottie talks about how, as a young girl to two raging alcoholics with incessant party lifestyles, she learned from a young age how to tidy up after her parents. The implication is strong that, even after their deaths, she still has her work cut out for her.

At times, though, Mona Mansour’s book struggles to fulfil that promise. Instead, we get a largely linear narrative of the Fitzgeralds’ life together, enlivened by Scottie conversing with Scott and Zelda’s ghosts as they hang around the Archive, reliving moments from their past.

And so we see Scott (David Hunter), enlisted and posted in early 1918 at an army camp in Alabama, encountering the magnetic, literate and alluring young Zelda. This pivotal role is usually played by the musical’s composer and lyricist, Hannah Corneau. On press night, understudy Amy Parker stepped up to deliver a formidable foil to Hunter’s Fitzgerald.

Both Corneau and Mansour are more interested in rescuing Zelda from the shadow of her more famous husband. Her mother is now more famous for having a mental illness, Scottie muses, and yet she effectively cowrote much of the work for which her husband still receives sole credit.

Corneau’s music makes no attempt to echo the era’s musical styles; instead, it adopts a rock aesthetic that initially promises to blow away the cobwebs from the tale of early 20th century socialites. But this is a style of music that can struggle to plough the emotional depth we expect from biographical musicals. Corneau’s penchant for repetitive lyrics, a technique that works well for chart music, here robs her of the opportunity to imbue some of her emotive melodies with words to match.

Still, Parker sells the hell out of Zelda, helping Beautiful Little Fool edge closer to its goal. Musically and charismatically, Hunter is on great form as her husband, but his character never really has the scripted opportunity to be anything other than a cipher. And when the whole musical is predicated on Zelda’s reputation coming out from under her husband’s shadow, lessening that dynamic diminishes her, too.

Much more interesting is Ward’s character, although even here there’s a sense that the writers struggle to identify precisely what Scottie’s conflict is. Is she on her mother’s side about how her talents were sidelined in favour of her husband’s? Is she irate about how Zelda was institutionalised in ways that ‘problematic’ women of the age were, while society accommodated men with the same symptoms? Does she wish that she had had a normal childhood, instead of living in a nursery that her parents’ part guests treated as an overspill area, and who had to learn how to clean up vomit at an early age?

The answer is yes to all of those things, but Mansour struggles to articulate how these elements are connected. Ward is called upon to switch from winsome recollection to fits of fury without the strength of character motivation to justify such switches.

While director Michael Greif makes ample use of a two-level set, making it seem far larger than it is, the production’s scale works against it to a certain extent. Beautiful Little Fool feels like a musical that has hit upon a subject matter and a style of delivery that should work. Right now, though, there are more rough edges than one would hope a new musical to have.

One can easily acknowledge the potential of this piece and how close Mansour and Corneau are to cracking the whole work. But as any novelist of F Scott Fitzgerald’s stature can attest, sometimes a manuscript needs just a little bit more polish.

Scott Matthewman