Doctor Who and Sherlock writers’ new show The Unfriend is unfunny and tedious – review
★★☆☆☆
Round up the audience at press night for Steven Moffat’s first London show and you’d have a pretty good BAFTA Awards attendee list. David Tennant, Jim Broadbent, Celia Imrie, Peter Capaldi and Sheila Hancock drift past me on the way in. “I got a BAFTA nom this morning,” one guest casually tells the guy sitting next to me.
There’s nothing wrong with the fact that a lot of celebs care about Moffat’s first London stage show. But it does nod to the power and influence the man has, and the singular takeaway is that this show is not very good. It feels like Doctor Who and Sherlock writer could do pretty much any project and the whole world would be waiting intently for the result.
Unlike his TV shows, such as the new Doctor Who which has carved a new path for a legacy series and will be remembered for hundreds of years, The Unfriend feels drawn-out, unfunny and uninspired. I hate to say this, but it feels like the type of theatre show a famous writer would write and then get fast-forwarded onto the West End stage because they have a platform and can probably shift tickets.
It starts with an unoriginal idea and a vaguely boring premise: an English family meet a Trump touting American lady on a cruise and invite her to stay with them if she ever visits England. But when she inevitably turns up, her opinions and behaviours leverage her from someone who is unnervingly right wing to someone who should be in jail.
It brings back strong memories of the popular noughties sitcom My Family. Similarly to most sitcoms, it often feels very surface. The generic look of the set, the caricatured teenagers, and much of the skits and the dialogue feel predictable, like something you’d watch exhausted on the sofa on a Monday night for a quick laugh rather than a palpable piece of drama fit for the stage. My guest notes that even the music in between scenes sounds generic, like a stock jingle from TV.
There is some enjoyable farce as The Unfriend moves along, but not enough to commit to calling this a slapstick play, so those moments end up spicing up a bland second act rather than careering this piece in a stronger direction. Mark Gatiss, who directs and has worked with Moffat for over a decade, can’t find much of a style either, leaving the show feeling dated.
That isn’t to say the actors don’t try their hardest: Reece Shearsmith is commanding and the most realised by far as Dad character Peter, and Frances Barber bowls ridiculously around stage as troublesome Elsa, fun to watch but the more you examine her in her fab oversized hats, the more she exposes how little else is going on.
On press nights there is typically a forced standing ovation because friends and family want to be supportive to the cast and crew no matter how good the show is. But many, including a handful of famous names around me, remained sitting. So many shows lost their runs during the pandemic, some cancelled entirely and never to return to the West End. It’s disappointing to see a drama that’s not ready to be staged given such a huge platform.
The Unfriend plays at the Criterion Theatre until 16 April