The term “yuppie” conjures visions of shoulder pads, Filofaxes and liquid lunches. This is the world Patrick Bateman inhabits and Bret Easton Ellis’s narcissistic banker is every inch the embodiment of it – a creature of Wall Street’s hedonistic heyday, blinging in designer-wear as he swings his axe at high-end escorts and the homeless.
So Rupert Goold’s decision to resurrect this musical adaptation of Ellis’s ghastly 1991 masterpiece is not without risk. Don’t these singing yuppies seem ridiculously passé now in their boxy suits and Ralph Lauren underwear? The satire is amped to 10, licking its lips, it seems, as it sends up the 1980s. But it never spirals into kitsch and our contemporary world of toxic masculinity, Trumpian capitalism and Insta-fuelled solipsism slowly, chillingly, creeps out of it.
This was the first show that Goold staged after taking over the Almeida theatre (then it starred Matt Smith and reached Broadway). It becomes his swan song as outgoing artistic director: a bloody, brilliant, full circle. Who could have imagined that a musical version of this story would work so well in the first place? First there is satire, deliciously dark, and then horror, which is not treated in the same maximalist, limb-sawing way as in Mary Harron’s film, but still unsettlingly effective when the violence comes.
Arty Froushan, as Bateman, is nowhere near as sinister as Christian Bale’s chainsaw-wielding film portrayal but his preppy boy-next-door turns gradually lunatic, shirt slicked with sweat by the end. It is an impressive performance in which he shows his range after his lead performance at the same theatre in The Line of Beauty. Anastasia Martin, as his earnest PA and one of the only likable characters, brings a sorrowful depth to her part of a woman painfully in love with her boss.
Duncan Sheik’s score contains one great electro-synth number after another, with a razor sharp book by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. Cards captures the absurd one-upmanship of Bateman’s banker bros; You Are What You Wear, sung by his east coast princess fiance, Evelyn (Emily Barber) among others, name-drops period fashion labels with undisguised shallowness. The witty book and lyrics take us back to the fetishisation of fine dining with upscale dishes involving sliced mango, sushi and sun-dried tomatoes that now sound laughably basic.
Alongside the original songs there are excellently performed blasts from the past: The Human League’s Don’t You Want Me brings an aggressively tinny sound. Phil Collins’ In The Air Tonight contains menace and melodrama, with some superb singing from a zombie-style ensemble who dance, writhe and bounce in aerobics gear. They sometimes appear robotic, other times plastic, never quite human, with gloriously arch choreography by Lynne Page.
Es Devlin’s fleet set design turns nightclubs into bedrooms into hideous mounds of twitching bodies. Jon Clark’s Stringfellows style lighting and Finn Ross’s projections give off a luminous, hallucinatory quality, insinuating Bateman’s unreliable reality.
The seeds of corruption in our world are all to be found here: Trump is Bateman’s hero and makes a brief appearance. Epstein is name-checked. The unspoken analogy between bankers and psychopaths bears resonance. Bateman deals in mergers and acquisitions (or is it “murders and executions”?) and although he is a product of the 1980s, the greed of his peers lays the ground for the economic crashes to come, their nihilistic, coke-snorting hedonism prefiguring the drama of Industry.
The unreliable narration of the book which renders Bateman a fantasist gives way to metaphor more clearly here: he is an abstraction, he tells us himself. He may not be out there, cutting up women, but his darkness, his abandoning of hope, sits within all of us.
• At the Almeida theatre, London, until 14 March
