REVIEW: BACKSTAGE @ PHOENIX ARTS CLUB

🎭 Backstage

📍 Phoenix Arts Club, 1 Phoenix Street, London, WC2H 8BU

🗓 Sunday 18th October 2026

⭐️ 1 Star

ILLUSIONS OF GRANDEUR

The Phoenix Arts Club is usually my ultimate West End happy place, but last night’s performance of BACKSTAGE left me wishing I’d stayed at the bar.

Look, I adore immersive theatre, and the concept here - a psychological thriller dipping its toes into live magic and surrealism - had so much potential on paper, and sounded exactly like my type of thing. Plus, being tucked away in those historic 1930s dressing rooms under the Phoenix Theatre usually guarantees an immediate dose of atmosphere. Sadly, yesterday's staging completely fumbled the assignment.

The biggest crime here was the pacing. Good psychological tension should feel like a tightening coil, but this felt more like waiting for water to boil. The dialogue was plagued by agonisingly long, awkward pauses that felt less like calculated dramatic tension and more like actors trying to remember their next cues. When you only have a short amount of time to pull an audience into a surreal world, every second counts, and yesterday the momentum just flatlined from the very beginning.

The piece opened with being welcomed to a magic show, and the entire opening was tedious, lacklustre, and devoid of energy and personality. Everything felt chronically under-rehearsed, and frankly, I was bored within the first couple of minutes, making the 45-minute runtime feel like a lifetime.

As for the "immersive" magic elements? It all felt incredibly clunky. Instead of seamlessly blurring the lines between reality and the stage, the interactive bits felt forced and completely broke whatever fragile illusion the cast was trying to build. The trouble is, they weren't actually interactive, as anyone called up on stage was part of the performance. I was asked to pick a number, and look at a cloth, but that was literally the entirety of the audience interaction. To use the term "immersive" in the description of the show is a huge stretch.

And the magic? Well, there were only two actual magic tricks in the entire show, and these both happened right at the start. The tricks were unbelievably basic, and the execution of them was clunky and drawn out.

To make matters worse, the script never really explains itself. We are dragged through a sequence of increasingly bizarre, disjointed moments, but we never arrive at any sort of satisfying payoff or clarity. Given the show's successful run in China before heading to the UK, I can’t help but wonder if the core narrative and nuance simply got lost in translation somewhere across the continents. What might have been a poetic, metaphorical puzzle in its original conception, felt like an incoherent sequence of scenes looking for a plot.

The creative team clearly has a vision, and it’s a fascinating idea, but unfortunately it got entirely lost behind the curtain.

I hate to do it, but with zero redeeming features, I cannot honestly or ethically award this production more than one star. I really wanted to love this, but the truth is that I couldn't wait for it to finish.

Neill Kovacic-Clarke

All views are my own and I pride myself on being honest, fair, and free from influence. Theatre is subjective and it is important to remember that all views expressed are just those of one reviewer.  

My ticket for this performance of Backstage was gifted by the Creative Producer, who invited me to watch the show in exchange for my honest review. The fact that my ticket was gifted played no part in the content of my review or the star rating given. 

CAST:

Beatrice Paolucci as Mike; Bai Ruiying as Iris; Alessia De Falco as Lena; Doina Komisssarov as Sophie

CREATIVES:

Producer - Haoming Li; Creative Producer - Jiaorong Yu; Assistant Producer - Yilin Yan; Director - Beatrice Paolucci; Assistant Director - Haoming Li; Art Director - Rui Lu; Movement Director - Bai Ruiying; Original Playwright - Junhan Cheng; English Adaptation and Translation - Anlan Shi; Dramaturg - Suneha Iravally Doreyappa Gowda; Visual Designer - Jiaorong Yu; Set and Props Designer - Wendi Wu; Costume Designer - Serene Liu; Sound and Music Designer - Yi Lu; Lighting Designer - Maggie Huang; Magic Designer - Shang Ma

RUNNING TIME (approx):

45 minutes, with no interval

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