Review: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

The colourful, Spanish brand of kitsch that made Pedro Almodovar's film so vivid has an energising effect on director Bartlett Sher's London version of this musical. Without it, its women whose nerves are shredded by such anxieties as unrequited love, in the case of Tamsin Greig's terrifically funny and coiled actress Pepa, or broken marriage, in the case of Hadyn Gwynne's vengeful Lucia, might have come across as a depressing procession of female misery.

All three are victims of the same middle-aged man - the kind of bloke about whom my Ladino-speaking grandmother would have said "sangre pesgada" which I think means "bitter blood" but in any case was generally used to describe any man she found particularly unimpressive. It really is hard to see what these women see in Jerome Pradon's narcissistic, balding Ivan.

If the show were set in Britain with a palette of blacks and greys, this really would leave you as depressed as the characters. But it's not. And the score by David Yazbek, one of the new generation of clever Jewish, Broadway composer/lyricists, keeps the audience's morale high, though not that of the characters who sing it. The evening is driven by a largely percussive score full of mambo and Latin rhythm. It's part-pastiche, as is usually the case these days, but actually it is also a rare, innovative work that actually justifies the phrase "original score". Jeffrey Lane's book cleverly intertwines the strands of plot, although when they finally all come together, with a policeman knocking at the door of Pepa's swish apartment and Marisa taking her clothes off for no apparent reason, it feels as if Joe Orton finished the script.

Greig sings no better than competently but her comic timing is among the best there is. And the neurotic energy and vulnerability with which she careers through the story keeps an overlong evening populated by stylishly dressed women from feeling like a drag.