American Psycho

After seeing Arty Froushan at the Almeida in The Line of Beauty towards the end of 2025, I conferred with my often time Almeida accomplice and we both agreed that he would make a good Patrick Bateman.

On the 28th of January, we were not disappointed. Froushan is on stage for almost every minute of the c. 2.5-hour runtime and gives a performance that captures the volatility of a mind that is increasingly fractured and manic as the play progresses. As if this weren’t enough, he is singing and dancing throughout. I found his Bateman frightening, though his rage is partially subsumed by artifice, it is constantly there, flickering in the flashing lights of the stage and backdrop. At one point, the stage lighting slowly changes and Bateman creeps downstage centre until he is stood there, only his silhouette perceptible, a body with no substance. It would be remiss of me not to mention Froushan’s physique, he achieves the much-vaunted “hard body” sought after by Bateman and the other entities in his universe and meet the bar that was set by Leo Suter in The Line of Beauty who, unless I misremember it, evoked gasps from the audience when his rippling physique was revealed in October last year.

The strength of a musical, I believe, lies in the ensemble, and this troupe raise the bar. The set pieces are mesmerising, there is a German word, gesamtkunstwerk, which broadly means “total work of art”. The show is worth more than the sum of all its parts because of the way that each aesthetic element interacts with the next one. I was sat in the centre of the theatre with wide eyes as I beheld the cast, the costume, the choreography, the set design, the lighting, and, of course, the music and lyrics all coalescing into one utterly captivating spectacle.

If you have any concerns that a musical may fail to deliver the chilling, visceral horror of the source material then, rest assured, you can bury these concerns, so to speak. There is one scene in particular that begins with cast members Hannah Yun Chamberlain and Kirsty Ingram contorted over Bateman\'s Van der Rohe chair in red underwear conjuring an immediately unsettling scene. As the lighting changes, the texture of the underwear shifts in a way that recalls laceration. A scream rips through the auditorium from the stalls and bodies in tattered clothing twist and pile up in centre stage creating a melange of limbs reminiscent of Gericault\'s Raft of the Medusa.

I will undoubtedly try to see it one more time before it closes on the 14th of March.