Have a Nice Life
By Jeremy Kingston for The Times


ASK people to name what they associate with Northern Ireland and stage musicals are not going to approach the top of anyone’s list. Conor Mitchell’s musical will not change that situation overnight but may set a change in motion since he has obvious talent as a composer, loves the musicals of yore and can pen a clever lyric when he feels like it.

As a director (and I presume this also means choreographer, since no one else is named) he can boldly shape a scene and snap us away from laughing at a comic effect into silent sympathy with a character in distress. What he has not yet mastered is how to shape the whole, where to build and where to relax, and when to decide a song has gone on long enough and stop his singers singing any more of it.

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Have A Nice Life, The Pleasance, London
By William Russell for The Herald

THIS sparkling, witty musical started life a year ago as a rehearsed reading by the Group Theatre in Belfast. It proved so successful that Plug Productions, who have presented it in its subsequent incarnations, was born.

It was seen on the Fringe at last year's Edinburgh Festival under the title Closure. Now, reworked by its patently abundantly talented composer and writer, Conor Mitchell, who also directs, it is getting a London showing.

The gimmick is simple. Six troubled souls, two men and four women, turn up for a group therapy session presided over by the clearly none-too-stable therapist Neville (Chris Robinson). It is, of course, a variation on Chorus Line, with its inquisitor director and the auditionees, but minus that show's glossy sentimentality and more than a hint of Sondheim.

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