Review: Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is a warm and charming treat on Coventry stage

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel was a smash hit film in 2012, which gave a host of older A-list stars a chance to show they could still shine.

It was based on a novel of the same name, by Deborah Moggach. The stage version, also by Deborah Moggach, opened on its final date of a UK tour in Coventry’s Belgrade Theatre this week. If the rest of the tour has had the same impact on audiences, then it has been a resounding success.

It is a charming, feel-good show, which saw the packed audience disappear here into the hot summer night full of good cheer and bonhomie. There were no great thrills on stage, and little in the way of dramatic tension, but there was plenty of warmth both on and off.

The set was magnificent, impressively recreating the huge, run-down but undoubtedly exotic hotel environment, all colonnades and staircases and patchy paintwork. One could feel the heat and the damp. Into it come a disparate group of older people, exiles from the UK’s uncaring world where older people are a redundant and expensive burden. They came seeking cheaper comfort and company and a place to call home. Like them, the hotel still contains reflections of its former glory, but is lacking a purpose.

The story within The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is quite thin, a vehicle really for the characters. Sonny Kapoor (Nishad More) and his mother (Rekha John-Cheriyan) are the owners, struggling to keep the place afloat. Mrs Kapoor wants Sonny to marry a nice rich girl to bail them out of trouble, but Sonny wants to marry Sahani (Shila Iqbal), who works at a call centre run by the hard-nosed businessman Mr Gupta (Tiran Aarkel). Among the guests are Evelyn (Tessa Peake-Jones) and Madge (Belinda Lang), two very different widows, the latter clearly out to catch another man, the former seeing release from her own timidity. Norman (Graham Seed) claims to be a widower but is in fact an abandoned husband, hoping to find reassurance as an outdated lothario. Douglas (Paul Nicholas) is a nice man unhappily married to Jean (Eileen Battye), a voracious devourer of culture. Dorothy (Paola Dionisotti), also widowed, has returned to find her happiness in the place from which she was expelled as a child by her uncaring parents many years ago; Muriel is a cheeky working class cockney woman escaping London’s dreary streets for a bit of fun. Each of them brings their own triumphs and tragedies to the scene, and it is the way these stories come together and intertwine that provides the meat of the play. It ends on a note of hope, that older age is no barrier to life, while it lasts, and that pleasures can still be found if the circumstances are right. The audience clearly appreciated it.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel runs until Saturday June 17. Visit belgrade.co.uk or call 024 7655 3055 to book.