How to Make a Mess – Upstairs at the Gatehouse

Picture: Danny Kaan

How to Make a Mess continues at Upstairs at the Gatehouse, London until 28 June 2026.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

Yes, there should be a musical about Nigella Lawson. Nearly three decades into the beloved food writer’s glittering career now, it feels like a massive oversight that Emily Rose Simons (book/music/lyrics) and Grace Taylor (director) are the first to attempt it. Conceived largely during the 2020 pandemic lockdown – like all the maddest ideas – 2023’s Becoming Nigella gave a small taste of their vision, and now we have this fully-fledged two act musical at Highgate’s gorgeous Upstairs at the Gatehouse.

Musically speaking, Simons has a knack for writing a fun tune, but it’s her emotional ballads that stand out on this occasion. Musical director David Merriman’s three-piece band make the orchestrations sound huge with Josie Campbell on cello and Ruth Whybrow on reeds. The set is striking: an aspirational but not unrealistic kitchen for a London flat. Maybe IKEA but the high-end cabinetry, all illuminated beautifully by Chris McDonnell’s tasteful lighting design.

But now: the minefield that is marketing a musical. The team behind How to Make a Mess have done an admirable job presenting the show as a kooky delight. The poster features Natasha Karp as protagonist Anna staring straight out at the viewer with a zany smirk, while Tanya Truman’s Nigella looms over her, all iconic smoulder and brandishing pink cooking utensils.

The theatre is splashed with yet more pink decoration and balloons, the programme features adorable cartoon Nigellas frolicking around the pages, and the show’s social media features an array of genuinely funny skits. Any ticket buyer might be forgiven for thinking they are in for a camp comedy musical featuring a real-life celebrity figure in the vein of Titanique or The Sam Neill Experience: A Dance Musical.

However, How to Make a Mess is a rumination on death, mental health, broken families and loneliness. The ‘Nigella’ of it all is but a surreal twist. When Anna’s estranged mother dies, she struggles facing her grief. She is further pushed toward the edge by the father who broke up their family re-entering her life.

In the depths of her struggle, she finds Nigella’s seminal 1998 book How to Eat. With Ms Lawson as her spirit guide, she realises cooking can provide the self-determination she had otherwise lost to her hard-partying and delivery apps lifestyle. With a greater sense of who she is, perhaps she can also come to terms with the trauma of her family past and the tragedy of her present.

It takes a while to recalibrate from frivolous expectations to How to Make a Mess’s hard-hitting psychological treatise. There is light humour sprinkled in but Act I consists mostly of Anna telling us her problems: not a great first impression for an audience primed for a silly good time. When we finally adjust, Nigella’s high-camp entrance to sparkles and a mirror ball is another tonal jolt. Truman’s portrayal gives us the requisite Nigella-isms – the sultry descriptions of food, the endless innuendos, the knowing looks to the audience – but is topped up with half a cup of relentlessly positive Disney sidekick and a teaspoon of Mary Poppins’ sage authority.

This tug and war between two equally valid but diametrically opposed nights at the theatre persists for two hours. Both performers possess excellent voices and forge solid connections with their audience. As much as Truman commands the room with her just-as-prim-if-not-quite-as-proper Mary Poppins take on Nigella, Karp matches her energy with some quite delicious nuance in her despair. She makes her character three-dimensional, bringing out the details of family and faith in Simons’ book.

Honestly, I love the big swing, and the show as a whole is far from a miss. A camp romp through the world of Nigella Lawson would struggle to fill two hours and the inevitable song dedicated to “me-crow-wah-vay” might well usher in the end of the musical theatre medium as we know it.

How to Make a Mess boasts convincing commercial sheen but beneath the surface is as profoundly weird as only someone trying to process their grief through a recipe book could be. I have no doubt its reflection on our shared condition is deeply personal and heartfelt. Honestly, the world of new musical theatre needs more of this chaotic spirit. Sometimes shows, like people, are just mad enough to be loveable. If you bite into a Victoria sponge and it tastes like prime rib, it might initially seem as though something has gone wrong, but whoever’s in the kitchen must be an extraordinary cook.

Ian Bowkett