American Psycho on stage – style over savagery

Instead of the axe falling on branches, it comes down on women’s necks. Artistic director Rupert Goold had thought of bowing out from the Almeida with that most eloquent of change-of-regime plays, The Cherry Orchard. Instead, he has put on American Psycho. The switch was made for practical reasons – the Donmar programmed the Chekhov first – yet the effect is purposeful. It completes a circle for Goold, who first directed the musical in 2013, when he was taking over at the Almeida. Grimly, as Megan Nolan writes, its psycho protagonist now has a new currency and a new following.

Patrick Bateman, the Wall Street investment banker/slasher created by Bret Easton Ellis in his 1991 novel, prescribes a honey-almond scrub, proscribes particular suits with tasselled loafers, categorises friends by designer labels and likes – it seems – to kill people, especially women. Is he a specialist in “murders and executions” or in “mergers and acquisitions”?

The character’s reception has been as fluctuating as his narration is unreliable. Simon & Schuster withdrew months before publication date after early reports of its violent misogyny (Vintage Books then picked it up). When the film version was released in 2000 “luxury products” refused to be featured in some scenes. Even when perceptible as satire, the action was thought to glamorise vicious materialism.

Goold’s first staging, with Matt Smith, met with box office success and critical division; not least within this critic. The same is true now. The run at the Almeida has already been extended. I can’t imagine a more accomplished production; I still think the show itself skinny, a glossy spiky demonstration – though not an advertisement – of what it is to be glossy and spiky.

Mingling with Phil Collins’s In the Air Tonight and Huey Lewis’s Hip to Be Square, Duncan Sheik’s music, with electronic shimmer and heavy drum beat, transmits the thump and aura of a migraine; his lyrics are neat, smirkingly rhyming “Manolo Blahnik” with “ironic” and doomily chiming “story” with “memento mori”. Violence is diffused, stylised, without real gore, apart from one Francis Bacon-style bloodied and twisted torso.

The script by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa encourages some soft edges. A wholesome secretary – sweetly sung by Anastasia Martin – got up in owlish specs and floppy grey culottes, incarnates the idea that bad dress signals good character. Bateman himself, who Smith made eerie and blank, is endowed by Arty Froushan with something approaching a heart; his killing sprees are more fantastical than frightening. He is an actor with a terrific future – he scythes into the action like a shark – but he is here unusually effortful: last year, in the Almeida’s The Line of Beauty, and as Noël Coward in Downton Abbey, composure rolled off him like smoke rings.

Lynne Page’s choreography – punching gym moves and shouldering advances – sends aggression through each lineup, as if the dancers were trying to suppress the air. The setting – design by Es Devlin, lighting by Jon Clark and video by Finn Ross – is both sleek and rough: a brick tunnel streaked with neon stripes. Katrina Lindsay’s costumes are crucial and the making of the evening. Not only declarations of identity (by his designer underpants shall ye know him), they are a guide to the action, and send a pulse through it.

A leaping chorus in white shirts and blood-red braces, scarlet fingernails clawing the air, is ready both for the office and the morgue. As Bateman’s febrile fiancee, a nimble Emily Barber wears a spiteful black dress that is a model of how to make a tiny piece of fabric look embattled. In a marvellous march, a row of softly tailored macs billows over the stage – grey and swollen like clouds; the coats are the characters.

All completely cohesive, but declaration rather than debate; a series of sizzling pictures. The triumph of Goold has always been not that he makes audiences adore or agree, but that he hooks them.

I often remember his audacity when, 22 years ago, he staged a voluptuous Paradise Lost in Northampton. He has lived up to that boldness at the Almeida. Championing fresh writing (King Charles III – in verse!), young actors (Patsy Ferran, Luke Thallon); foregrounding set design (Hildegard Bechtler, Miriam Buether); and supporting directors who illuminate established work: Rebecca Frecknall with Summer and Smoke, Robert Icke with Oresteia.

He now moves to the Old Vic. He will make it new.

American Psycho is at the Almeida, London, until 21 March

Photograph by Marc Brenner