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)