'... Every lighting cue, soundscape, costume change and prop serves the narrative, guiding the audience with cinematic precision through a series of meticulously crafted scenes. Shifting seamlessly from song to song, every theatrical flourish deepens the emotional truth of the record.

This contains every ingredient of a great pop show, yet its refusal to behave like one is what makes it extraordinary. Lily Allen’s emotional awareness and creative fearlessness is something to be admired, and her work remains honest, vulnerable and resonant. The result is live music at its most ambitious: part theatre, part therapy and completely unforgettable.'

BUZZ MAG

'Lily Allen’s West End Girl could make sensational theatre...

Intimate monologue or performance art? The singer’s recent gigs give a tantalising idea of what a stage adaptation of her album might look like. 

The West End Girl tour was designed by Allen’s co-creative director Anna Fleischle, who also created the set for 2:22 – a haunted house in the process of gentrification, peeling wallpaper on one wall and luxury kitchen on the other. Fleischle’s concert set slowly reveals itself, with a different mise-en-scene for most numbers and often a new outfit too (styling by Mel Ottenberg). There’s an elegant chaise longue, soft lighting and diaphanous negligee for the delicate, disorientated Sleepwalking and some inventive videography, with an illusory effect of arms caressing her back, for Tennis.

... Relapse is delivered with a raw realism that’s hard to watch. And there is a spectacularly realised sequence for the song 4chan Stan with its blissfully sweet high notes and sour discoveries. She appears dressed in a huge sheet printed with receipts, after finding the credit card expenses of her partner’s affair.'

The Guardian 

"... It was one of the most provocative and devastating parts of her “West End Girl” concert adaptation at The Auditorium in the Loop on Friday night. As the singer finds proof of her husband’s infidelities, she nearly suffocates herself with a sheet pulled over her head that’s imprinted with lyrics and a mile-long sales record of items he has bought for other women...

...But the theatrical interpretation is an even more intimate and voyeuristic attempt at art imitating life, allowing viewers to sit with the pain alongside Allen.

...All of it plays out within a compacted box stage that mirrors the bones of a house where these situations would normally be kept behind closed doors.'

Chicago Sun Times