Barcelona West End review – Lily Collins and Álvaro Morte are revelatory in enigmatic drama

A drunken girl in a white jump suit staggers through a doorway of a Barcelona apartment snogging the man she has just picked up in a bar. Or perhaps he picked her up. Anyhow, that’s the starting point for Bess Wohl’s new play which might be subtitled Emily in Spain.

Or at least that it’s selling point. Lily Collins, star of Emily in Paris, has chosen to make her stage debut in this two-hander, opposite the Spanish actor Álvaro Morte, who is also a Netflix star (in Money Heist) and is making his UK stage debut.

Directed by Lynette Linton, their performances are the principal reason to see Barcelona. Both have real charisma, drawing us gently into a play that starts as a romantic comedy, tips into sentimentality and then emerges the other side as something more moving, tentative and strange. It’s an odd construct but somehow it works.

Irene (Collins) is an American in Barcelona on a hen weekend (a bachelorette party), which accounts for the whistle shaped like a penis that she is wearing around her neck. Manuel, whom she insists on calling Manolo, is tall, dark and very handsome, but somehow something always stops them getting further than a few drunken kisses.

For one thing, the apartment they are meeting in, evocatively conjured by Frankie Bradshaw’s lived-in design, full of battered furniture and fading light, is about to be demolished. For another, for all her wild child energy and innocent-abroad vibe, Irene is clearly unhappy. When Manuel interrupts her energetic dance of seduction to play her Puccini’s “O Mio Babbino Caro” they stand in awed silence, before agreeing that it is “precioso”, “the most precioso thing in my entire life,” she adds mournfully.

Gradually, their stories emerge, changing their relationship.  Wohl mixed the political and the personal to good effect in Camp Siegfried, about love in a Nazi youth camp, staged last year at the Old Vic, and she does something similar here, though this time it seems as if it is the characters rather than the history that she is most deeply engaged with.

Most readers of thrillers might spot the plot twists coming, but they are still unexpected enough not to want to spoil them, and they are beautifully held in balance by Linton’s sensitive, quiet direction, and by the two performances that constantly shift between the comic and the emotional, without ever losing their compass.

Collins is a revelation, as lively as she is as Emily, yet with a lovely capacity for stillness; as she listens to Manuel talk about love, she becomes becalmed, her shifting from foot to foot stopping as she becomes first enthralled and then appalled by what he is saying. When she talks about “the wedding industrial complex”, she manages to mix dreaminess and despair, the sense of a Denver girl clinging to her illusions with a harder-nosed realisation that they may be fake.

Morte is equally impressive, beautifully timing his exasperation as Irene’s various repetitive neurosis and conversational tropes appear, mining more deeply as the sadnesses in his own story begin to emerge.

It’s a strangely old-fashioned concoction, not at all earth-shattering or ground-breaking, not always as truthful as it wants to be, or as revelatory as it hopes, yet always engrossing and warm-hearted. A gentle pleasure.