Plaza Suite review: Real-life couple Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick cannot save Neil Simon’s dated romcom

The husband-wife duo star in John Benjamin Hickey’s adaptation of the classic Simon comedy – but they’re not always in on the jokes, writes Alice Saville

A still from John Benjamin Hickey’s adaptation of Neil Simon’s ‘Plaza Suite’ (Marc Brenner)

Sex and the City won legions of super-loyal fans because of its sleek, sexy vision of Gen X womanhood – Sarah Jessica Parker’s priorities were fashion and friendship, not running round after men. So it’s a bit surprising that she’s decided to make her West End debut in a creaky 1968 Neil Simon comedy that harks back to the days when women were meant to fill their brains exclusively with fussing over their husbands and kids. She and her real-life husband Matthew Broderick co-star as three different couples in a trio of flip but dated short plays set in the same hotel suite.

It’s certainly fun to see the legendary SJP playing against type in the first playlet, “Visitor From Mamaroneck”. In character as 48-year-old Long Island housewife Karen, she bounds around the eponymous Plaza Suite in a horribly dowdy blouse and worn slippers, announcing that “I am definitely some old lady”. On SATC, Karen would be off having sexcapades in Manolos. In this retro throwback, she’s niggling at her workaholic husband Sam (played by a perpetually exasperated Broderick), trying to work out whether he’s having an affair or is just too damn unimaginative to see the sexual possibilities of a night in a New York hotel, one for which she deliberately packed no pyjamas.

Sarah Jessica Parker in ‘Plaza Suite’, currently running at the Savoy Theatre (Marc Brenner)

Hotels can be places of freedom, possibility, anonymity, but each of the three sets of couples Parker and Broderick play here are imprisoned by their own mid-century mindsets in the gilded jail of New York’s Plaza, its lavish interior beautifully, laboriously rendered by John Lee Beatty’s set design.

In the second play, “Visitor from Hollywood”, Parker reappears as a gaucher, more kittenish species of housewife. Muriel is in town to remake the acquaintance of old flame Jesse, now a famous movie producer, but soon finds that the encounter is throwing her suburban virtue into question. Broderick gets to have more fun with this role, skidding across the Plaza’s floors in ridiculous wide-legged trousers as Muriel’s adulation restores his lost virility.

The jokes feel effortful and small ‘c’ conservative (Marc Brenner)

Then, everything descends into total silliness with the final play, “Visitor from Forest Hills”. Parker and Broderick play another middle-aged married couple, who are desperately attempting to marry off their 21-year-old daughter Mimsey – if only she’d come out of the bathroom. Downstairs, the cocktail weiners are going cold. Upstairs, Broderick is ripping his tailcoat by climbing out the window of this ninth-floor suite, willing to risk his life to ensure this reluctant bride surrenders to the all-powerful creed of suburban monogamy. The whole ludicrous escapade builds to a single punchline, one that no doubt felt significantly zingier in 1968, when lithe young hippies strolled through New York, making staid fortysomethings feel insecure about their paunches and life choices.

Matthew Broderick in ‘Plaza Suite’, currently on at Savoy Theatre (Marc Brenner)

Playwright Neil Simon was Broadway’s most successful chronicler of the era: he wrote dozens of shows in the Sixties and Seventies and raked in millions in royalties. But while his work on musicals Sweet Charity and A Chorus Line has endured, comedies such as Plaza Suite haven’t, and director John Benjamin Hickey’s production doesn’t make much of a case for reviving them. The jokes feel effortful and small “c” conservative: landing them would be a stretch for far more accomplished stage actors than Parker and Broderick, who are just about good enough here.