When Nella, daughter of super-rich American Theodore Racksole, can’t get a steak and a bottle of beer for her birthday dinner at the luxurious Grand Babylon Hotel, her father buys the hotel.

She gets the steak, but they soon discover there’s more to running a hotel than meets a guest’s eye. When staff start to disappear, a guest dies in mysterious circumstances, and a German Prince vanishes, we are off on a rollercoaster thriller ride down secret tunnels and on cross-channel boats that is huge fun.

The Grand Hotel Babylon was written by Arnold Bennett, Stoke’s most famous literary son, and published in 1902, the same year as his now classic novel, Anna of the Five Towns. But Hotel Babylon was initially much more successful. Published, like Dickens’ work, in a magazine in instalments, it was rapidly translated into four languages and described by critics as ‘excellent in the mixture of farce and characterisation’, and so it is. Which makes it perfect material for a stage adaptation where five actors play at least 16 parts, and costume changes happen at lightning speed; which is something the New Vic company excel at, as anyone who has seen their Around The World In 80 Days will confirm.

The pleasure here, and it is a great pleasure, is not just in watching a gripping and funny story being told, but also the wit and skill at work in the telling, thanks to the excellent adaptation by Deborah McAndrew and the tight inventive direction by Conrad Nelson, both of the new Claybody Theatre, with whom this is a co-production.

The actors, too, excel. Michael Hugo is a veteran of both this stage and this style, and despite being the villain and the police inspector, among others, he is in total command, especially when things go wrong. If Hugo is in a show, my advice would be not to sit in the front row, you never know what might happen. Shelley Atkinson is another veteran of this kind of work. I last saw her playing a frog in Hansel and Gretel at Williamson Park, where she gave the best feminist speech I have ever heard in British theatre. Here she gives a number of roles, but it is her German Nanny Heidi that will live on in my fevered imagination.

Thomas Cotran is new to me, as are Adrian Pang and Alice Pryor, but I hope to see all of them again soon. Cotran not only gives us a nervous Englishman and an upright German Prince, but also an emotional Italian chef with a sideline in embalming, and he dances like a dream. Pang and Pryor only essay one role each, as the millionaire Racksole and his daughter Nella, but they not only hold the piece together, they drive the story along, and at a cracking pace. Pang’s evocation of crawling through secret tunnels is vivid while Pryor’s shy seduction of Cotran’s Prince Aribert is a delight. And Aribert falls. My, how he falls.

James Atherton’s incidental music underscores the production like an action movie score, and Lis Evans’ design and Beverley Norris-Edmunds’ choreography fit the period bill exactly.

This is that rare thing, a great night out. I’d go again just for the hilarious scene on the deck of the boat at the start of act two. If you’re a fan of this kind of thing, you’ll be delighted to hear that, next year, the New Vic is bringing back that award-winning production of Around the World In 80 Days. And chapeau to the New Vic’s artistic director Theresa Heskins and her co-director Vicki Amedume for their nomination as Best Director in the UK Theatre Awards for their astonishing production of Angela Carter’s The Company of Wolves.

By Chris Wallis, Theatre Editor

Main image by Andrew Billington

 

The Grand Babylon Hotel is at the New Vic, Stoke-on-Trent until October 4, 2025. For more information, click here.