Rupert Goold’s thirteen-year tenure as artistic director of the Almeida Theatre in Islington has seen it transform into a leading fringe venue, notable for its bold storytelling and out-of-the-box approach to classic plays. So, in offering audiences a stage adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s cult 90s novel American Psycho—a story of shopping sprees and killing sprees—the impresario naturally saw its potential as a musical in which dark deeds and fizzing synth pop sit side-by-side.
The show had its first run in 2013 with Matt Smith in the lead role of Patrick Bateman, the eighties Wall Street banker obsessed with status and beautiful surfaces. In 2026, Arty Froushan (of Downton Abbey fame) is at the bloody helm, and the fable seems to have more relevance than ever. It features a set of Trump-loving Ivy League bros who believed they were promised the world. However, since leaving university, they have frittered away their brains and working hours comparing font sizes, spent their nights drugged up in downtown clubs, and found themselves capable only of forming personal relationships if they are as flimsy as badly made business cards. Theirs is a world of nauseating emptiness, where money is everything, and people are reduced to box-fresh products. Life is one despair-inducing anti-climax, and genuine emotions, like reservations at the swanky Dorsia restaurant, are all but out of reach.
What could be the restorative for such a wearying existence? Bateman advises a meticulously planned skincare routine; oh, and a part-time penchant for murdering, especially of one’s irritating colleagues and the economically disenfranchised (and hence valueless) members of society. Indeed, it is his amorality and bigotedness that saturates the whole of the character’s eerily detached third-person narration. ‘There’s an idea of Patrick Bateman,’ he tells us, as if referring to himself as a character authored by late capitalism or a brand name with a specific market value.
Froushan brilliantly interprets Bateman as an edgy and insecure hedonist. For him, murder not only provides release but allows for an assertion of control, if momentarily, in a world where all is dictated by market forces and the glossy pages of GQ. There’s a Beckettian ineffectuality to his life. And it is to Froushan’s credit that he brings this out. His Bateman is genuinely tragic, almost even sympathetic, surrounded as he is by soulless zombies that are deaf to his psychological anguish and outcries about the existential chasm that he has peered into at Bloomingdale’s.
Fashionably, Es Devlin’s set is kept minimalist and slick, all the better for showing the pools of red light which frequently flood the stage under the direction of lighting designer Jon Clark. It has a secondary function of playing on the audience’s sense of reality, so it is hard to discern precisely what is emerging from Bateman’s fevered imagination.
The original high-energy songs intensify the production’s unhinged atmosphere. Bateman’s fiancé, Evelyn, a preened Jackie Kennedy lookalike, sings the particularly comic ‘You are What You Wear’, posturing and pouting in couture as if on the set of an MTV music video. Anastasia Martin offers a counterpoint as Bateman’s PA Jean, her sweet, liquid vocals in ‘A Girl Before’ radiating authentic human feeling. Eighties anthems by Phil Collins and the Human League were brought into the mix, used nostalgically to evoke the sonic texture of the era, and were very well received by the audience.
There’s blood, banality and existential crisis. And with a soundtrack of numbing synth beats and screams throughout, it’s enough to give you a splitting headache and a spell of depression the next morning. But the demented musical is not playing with shock value. It yields razor-sharp insights into the state of late capitalism and its effects on human psychology and relationships. Although Goold has chosen to go out with a revival of a production first staged over ten years ago, this American Psycho feels as fresh as one of Patrick’s herbal mint facemasks. Now there’s a simile Bret Easton Ellis would like.
American Psycho
Musical
Book by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
Music and Lyrics by Duncan Sheik
Based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis
Director: Rupert Goold
Photo credits: Ellie Kurtz
Cast includes: Arty Froushan; Emily Barber; Daniel Bravo; Jack Butterworth; Oli Higginson; Kim Ismay; Alex James-Hatton.
Until: Saturday 14th March 2026
Running Time: 2 hours and 30 minutes, including an interval
Review by Olivia Hurton