Next to Normal – Donmar Warehouse

Picture: Marc Brenner

Next to Normal continues at the Donmar Warehouse, London until 7 October 2023.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩ 

Thirteen years after its Broadway run won three Tony Awards (including Best Original Score) and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, it is fair to say that a West End production of Next to Normal has been keenly anticipated. There may be several reasons for why it has taken so long, but it is more than possible that the musical’s subject matter meant that it required the right producers to come along.

For while West End musicals often deal with challenging issues, it tends to be with a feel-good gloss. Imagine what Matilda would be like if the abusive practices of Crunchem Hall were dealt with earnestly, for example.

Directed here by Michael Longhurst, there is no such gloss on Next to Normal, a portrayal of a woman (Diana, played by Caissie Levy) whose bipolar disorder, and its resistance to treatment, places inordinate pressure on both her and her family. At times, the intensity of the portrayal can be overwhelming: not for nothing did The New York Times describe the piece as a “feel everything musical”.

Yet Brian Yorkey’s book and lyrics, for all that drama, contain huge amounts of heart as well. Diana’s family – her husband Dan (Jamie Parker) and their children Natalie (Eleanor Worthington-Cox) and Gabe (Jack Wolfe) – initially seem like a typical family, albeit struggling at times with Diana’s condition. There is a lightness to the early moments of Tom Kitt’s rock-infused score, with musical references to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘My Favourite Things’ as Diana discusses her long list of medications with Trevor Dion Nicholas’ Dr Fine in ‘My Psychopharmacologist and I’.

But while there are other moments of lightness throughout – mostly provided by Jack Ofrecio’s engaging turn as Natalie’s hesitant, ever-supportive boyfriend Henry – there is little to laugh at. As Diana rejects, and flushes away, her medication because it flattens out all sense of pleasure (in ‘I Miss the Mountains’) she is supported by Wolfe’s Gabe – even though the real Gabe died as a baby before his sister was born.

Gabe is much more than a spectral contrivance, instead becoming a physical manifestation of Diana’s condition – benign and manageable one minute, veering between Puck-like mischievousness and overpowering dominance the next. In many ways, Wolfe’s performance becomes the lynchpin upon which the conceit at the heart of the musical rests, and its success is in no small part down to his magnetic portrayal. Wolfe reaches his peak in the electrifying ‘I’m Alive’, but throughout he adds depths to a show already swimming in them.

Worthington-Cox (making a name for herself this year as a traumatised teenager, coming off her recent turn as Lily in The Secret Life of Bees at the Almeida Theatre) has a narrower range of emotions to play than her stage brother, but impresses just as much. Her Natalie – already feeling distanced from a mother who cares more about the brother she never knew, only to be completely forgotten when Diana’s electro-convulsive therapy treatment causes her to lose her memory – echoes the same mixture of strength, vulnerability and raw terror that Levy exhibits as Diana.

Around this maelstrom of emotion, Parker’s Dan sometimes feel a little lost, although when the attention turns to his own distress he does get the chance to shine. Less well served is Nicholas as Diana’s doctors, Dr Fine and Dr Madden. Yorkey’s book struggles to paint him as anything other than a floundering soul, offering treatment after treatment and then rationalising each failure with a detachment that is cold to the point of callousness.

Throughout, Levy wrings every last emotion out of Diana’s journey through her traumatic condition. Backed by musical director Nick Barstow’s six-piece band, performing on the balcony above the pale wood minimalism of Chloe Lamford’s set, Levy takes us on a journey through her character’s varying mental state with an enlightening clarity.

And that is the case throughout, such that projections of pills and firing neurons onto the stage and set contribute little, doing more to distract than illuminate scenarios which the cast are more than capable of illustrating.

But that aside, Next to Normal gives a frank, revealing experience of living with – and living with someone who is living with – a severe psychological disorder. It may have taken years to arrive in the West End, but its presence is welcome indeed.

Scott Matthewman