Theatre Review: Groundhog Day is one to see over and over again

The director Matthew Warchus has, however, a rare skill when it comes to breathing new life into all-too-familiar formulas – I think of his Boeing-Boeing and A Christmas Carol – and he’s pulled it off again magnificently with Groundhog Day.

The 1993 film depended much on its visual comedy – an exasperated Murray punching the annoying former classmate as he has to relive the same day over and over again etc – but Warchus’s stage production is a lot darker and deeper.

It’s one of the contradictions of the human condition that we at once yearn for routine but also feel trapped by it, and, in his stark almost Edvard Munch-like evocations of the central character Bill Connors’ increasingly tenuous grip of reality, Warchus comes as close as I’ve ever seen to depicting insanity on a stage. 

As the initially obnoxious Phil Connors, Andy Karl gives a mesmerising central performance in which he gradually exposes more and more of the human being buried beneath the layers of prime-time media world vacuity and arrogance.  

Warchus, and his writer Danny Rubin who co-wrote the script to the original film, and Tim Minchin overseeing the music and lyrics, have together managed to take a film that I couldn’t imagine could ever be improved upon and managed to improve upon it. One I’d happily see over and over again.