Review: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel @ Festival Theatre, Edinburgh

“The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel weaves a truly delightful spell.” Moggach and Young strike theatrical gold with a fresh look at a well-loved tale.

📍 Festival Theatre, Edinburgh
📅 Wed 31 May to Sat 3 Jun 2023
🕖 Evenings 7.30pm | Matinees 2.30pm
🕖 Running time: Approx 2 hours 30 minutes (with one interval)
✏️Writer: Morna Young
🖊️ Writer: Deborah Moggach
🎬 Director: Lucy Bailey
🎼 Composer: Kuljit Bhamra
🛠️ Costume & Set Designer: Colin Richmond
💡 Lighting Designer: Oliver Fenwick
🔊 Sound Designer: Mic Pool
🎂 12+
🎭 Wheelchair Accessible Venue, Wheelchair Accessible Toilets, Audio Induction Loop

Many theatre-goers may find themselves wondering whether it’s worthwhile to check out a theatrical version of a beloved movie. Rest easy, for while Deborag Moggach’s play shares a name, and a premise with the movie adapted from her novel These Foolish Things, both cast and plot are substantially divergent from all works gone before.

The Margold Hotel remains, a once magnificent, now tired pile in Bangalore India. In need of paying guests, manager Sonny Kapoor (an endearing Nishad More) contrives to prevent his mother Mrs Kapoor, played by a regal Rekha John-Cheriyan, from selling up. Lacking local custom, he hits on the idea of making the place a residential retirement home with rates far cheaper than the soaring UK average. The first ageing guinea-pigs soon arrive, and it doesn’t take long before everyone’s life takes a series of unexpected, challenging, but ultimately empowering turns.

Colin Richmond’s set impresses from the start, a generous, uncluttered construction designed in a recognisably Indian vernacular. There’s a confident solidity here, the architecture offering Olive Fenwick opportunities for an evolving, and evocative lighting design. Combined with the soundscape of the bustling city outside, replete with humanity, tuk tuks, and exotic fauna thanks to Mic Pool, it’s an immersive, believable little world.

The cast are excellent, replete with household names, and offering precisely the confident, characterful performances the play demands. Every inch an ensemble piece, there truly isn’t a single dominant storyline, but a tapestry of lives playing out in surprising ways. Stage legend Paul Nicholas effortlessly slides into the role of charming retired history teacher Douglas, finding his wife, Jean (Eileen Battye) has matured a tad odiously. Small screen star, Tessa Peak-Jones delights as widowed Evelyn, discovering a self-definition beyond wife and mother. Graham Seed, post his unforgivable extinction in The Archers, creates the problematic but not irredeemable Norman, whilst the redoubtable Paola Dionisotti provides an enigmatic Dorothy, hunting ghosts of her childhood, but finding past and present closer than expected.

Then there’s a marvellously big-hearted turn from Marlene Sidaway as the former cleaner surprised to uncover another chapter to her life, rather than the final pages. Completing the hotel residents is Belinda Lang’s no-prisoners taken Madge, hunting husband 4, and taking no sh*t from anyone.

The pre-existing life of the hotel, and city is brought to life by some tremendous casting. Harmage Singh Kalirai emanates curmudgeonly pride as the hotel’s head gofer, Shila Iqbal is energetically adorable as call-centre supervisor, and Sonny’s counterpart in love, Sahani, whilst Tiran Aakel exudes BBE (Big Businessman Energy) as call centre magnate Mr Gupta.

Deft direction from Lucy Bailey brings continual clarity to the many intertwining plot strands winding on and off-stage, the pace gentle, but implacable. Through it all, the sense of the Marigold hotel as a living, breathing community grows and grows, inviting the audience to care for its survival as much as its individual residents. There’s a ready supply of surprising twists in everyone’s life, and a surprising smattering of smashing one-liners.

Indeed the only thing preventing this show from a perfect rating is a rather rushed final 10 minutes. Whilst ultimately ending in a cheering, satisfactory conclusion, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel could use another scene just to let those pieces, so lovingly handled up till that point, cascade naturally into position, instead of pushing them. Goodness knows, the audience won’t object to a few minutes more in the company of such an enchanting band of thespians at the top of their game. You see, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel weaves a truly delightful spell.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel plays the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh from Wed 31 May to Sat 3 Jun 2023. It is a Simon Friend Entertainment Limited production in association with Jenny King, Trafalgar Theatre Productions, Gavin Kalin, and David Adkin.