Next to Normal
Donmar Warehouse | ★★✩✩✩

If Long Day’s Journey Into Night were a rock musical it would have turned out something like this show, the plot of which sees a family at the mercy of a mother’s mental health.

Unlike Eugene O’Neill’s play, however, the mother’s affliction in this 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning musical, which also won a Tony for Tom Kitt’s rock-infused score, is not morphine addiction but manic depression, a disorder that has much stigma attached and which this show can fairly claim to have diminished.

The Pulitzer judges were clearly impressed by this, and by the music too no doubt. Yet surely not the storytelling, on which more later.

The UK debut of this New York hit, which was nominated for 11 Tony awards, is led by Broadway’s Caissie Levy who since she starred as Frozen’s first on-stage Elsa has channelled her Jewishness in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, Or Change and Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt.

Here though she plays the middle- aged mother of a high-achieving family who live in a modernist house.

Daughter Natalie (Eleanor Worthington-Cox) is a musical prodigy, her surly but sensitive brother Gabe (a mesmerisingly good Jack Wolfe) is also bursting with potential while their father Dan (Jamie Parker) is the rock that prevents the family’s descent into neurosis driven by Diana’s bi-polar manic depression.

Their struggle is played out mainly on the ground floor of an open-plan house, while in Michael Longhurst’s slick and superbly performed production the on-stage band occupies the upstairs rooms. The cool design also attempts to compensate for absence of enquiry in this show.

Anyone wanting to know more about the biological, psychological and chemical elements of the mysterious disorder will have to settle for projections of scanned brain activity, which we are presumably intended to infer are unhealthy — and Diane’s.

Eleanor Worthington-Cox in NEXT TO NORMAL - Donmar Warehouse - photo by Marc Brenner

Eleanor Worthington-Cox as Natalie (Photo: Marc Brenner)

Elsewhere her psychiatrist (Trevor Dion Nicholas) describes matters in layman’s terms. There is a lot of “it’s all perfectly normal”, when she can barely face another second of life.

There is no attempt to reflect the scientific struggle to save humans in the way there is with, say, Dr Semmelweis (still on at the National). Instead the plot by Brian Yorkey (book and lyrics) settles unambitiously almost entirely on the symptoms of Diane’s conditions, and the familial drama it causes.

Worse, it turns out that our unstable heroine’s psychosis was created by the loss of her first child born 18 years previously. Alarm bells should always ring when a plot, especially a fictional one, turns to dead babies in order to elicit tears and emotion from its audience.

And there should be a wailing of klaxons when it veers to the downright improbable as happens here when Diane suffers a complete loss of memory due to three weeks of electroconvulsive therapy.

The side effect is only discovered after Dan drives his wife home where it is revealed that even before Diane has taken her coat off she has forgotten who he and Natalie are.

Would this not have emerged during the treatment? Would she not have asked who the hell owns the car she is getting into?

Instead, more emotions and another song — called Song of Forgetting — are triggered. Like all the others it is superbly sung. And Levy’s voice has a clarity and power that rises above even the band’s instruments played on the floor above her.

However, I cannot remember a show that was so annoyingly written and impressively performed. Thankfully, there will always be Long Day’s Journey.