Live Report: Lily Allen turns heartbreak into theatre at 3Arena

It is tempting to describe Lily Allen's West End Girl show as a concert, but that would be like describing the album itself as simply another break-up record. Both technically fit the category, yet neither really belongs there. This is theatre, or something close enough to it that the distinctions begin to feel beside the point, a seventy-minute piece of autobiographical performance of her brilliant album and the heartbreak that inspired it. On paper, West End Girl arrived wrapped in the language that has so often been used to diminish women's art. It was described as raw, confessional, vulnerable, an unflinching account of the collapse of Lily Allen's marriage, of infidelity, betrayal and the slow realisation that a life which looked impossibly glamorous from the outside had become unliveable from within. Yet words like "raw" often implying that something is uncrafted, that emotion simply spilled onto the page without form or intention. This production makes the opposite argument. Every image, every costume change, every camera angle, every piece of furniture has been considered.

The storytelling begins before Allen even appears. Rather than employing a support act, the audience is presented with cellists playing Allen’s greatest hits, as words above the stage invite us to sing along to her catalogue of earlier hits. It is an unexpected and clever decision. We arrive celebrating the soundtrack to our own adolescence before being asked to sit with the woman who had to live through the years that followed.

When Lily Allen appears, the words ‘West End Girl’ emblazoned above the stage in neon, the performance begins – and the thought behind it is immediately clear.

Crafted by Olivier-winning theatre designer Anna Fleischle, the set resembles an impossibly luxurious apartment, framed almost like a proscenium stage within a stage. Heavy emerald velvet curtains surround a carpeted floor scattered with a bed, a chaise lounge and carefully chosen domestic objects. Seven gilded frames around the stage function as video screens, alternately displaying live close-ups, distorted projections and pre-recorded imagery. Lamps descend from the ceiling, fabric becomes veil and prison in equal measure, platforms rise and fall, cameras emerge from unexpected places. It is sumptuous without ever becoming cluttered, theatrical without relying on spectacle.

Most strikingly, all of this grandeur serves one purpose: making Allen appear painfully small.

She is already physically slight, tottering through the production in high heels, silk robes trimmed with fur, glittering dresses and lingerie that evoke everything from a Vogue editorial to Valley of the Dolls. Yet surrounded by cavernous rooms, towering curtains and panoramic Manhattan skylines, she seems to disappear into her own life. The apartment itself becomes another character, a monument to aspirational luxury that slowly reveals itself as little more than an exquisitely decorated cage.

Anyone who followed Allen's public life over recent years will recognise echoes of the apartment she once shared with her former husband, actor David Harbour: the lavish interiors that became social media content in their own right, all clashing fabrics, designer lamps and impossibly curated rooms. Here, those same aesthetic references are quietly dismantled. The furniture remains. The skyline remains. The expensive taste remains. What disappears is the illusion that beautiful surroundings can protect anyone from humiliation.

The production repeatedly explores the strange gap between performance and intimacy. Throughout the evening Allen performs versions of womanhood that feel increasingly desperate: the glamorous wife, the accommodating partner, the sexually adventurous woman trying to become everything her husband might want. During ‘Tennis’, she strips to lingerie while singing "I want to be your whore", posing on the bed with the studied perfection of a fashion shoot, but the glamour never reads as empowerment. It reads as labour. She is performing for someone who has already stopped looking.

This is where the theatricality becomes so effective. Rather than illustrating the songs literally, the staging finds visual metaphors that deepen them. A hidden camera inside a pastel pink fridge transforms an ordinary kitchen appliance into a confessional, Allen repeatedly opening its door in search of food, champagne, another vape, anything that might offer relief, only to find emptiness. During ‘Rumination’ and ‘Relapse’, glitter runs with tears down giant close-ups of her face while her projected image fractures across curtains behind her, as if even her reflection can no longer remain intact.

The apartment itself keeps changing function. After images of Manhattan subways on the screen show a change of location, another bed emerges on stage to portray a different apartment, the infamous ‘Pussy Palace’, where Allen pulls sex toys and various accoutrement out of plastic bags, confronted with the reality of the affairs happening behind her back. Curtains become projection screens. A translucent sheet of fabric, covered in the handwritten of her ex’s trove of love letters, wraps around Allen's head like she’s asphyxiating on betrayal. A chandelier lies collapsed on the stage beside a similarly slumped Allen during ‘Let You Win’, the light in both flickering.

Allen's acting experience proves invaluable throughout the show, captured in close up on the screens around her. The smallest gestures become devastating: rubbing her brow during a phone call that changes everything, trying to steady a trembling chin, a tear running down her face.

And like traditional theatre, Allen barely acknowledges the audience for almost the entire performance. There are no stories between songs, no routine declarations of how wonderful Dublin is, no interruptions to break the world the production has created. She remains inside the apartment, inside the marriage, inside the narrative.

Yet the audience responds anyway.

During the heartbreaking ‘Just Enough’, as Allen sings about fear the man she loves is now in love with someone else, thousands of phones quietly rise across the arena, lights glowing in unison without instruction, as if to say “We’re here. We see you. We’ve had our hearts broken, too. We got you. You’re enough.”

By the closing song, ‘Fruity Loop’, much of the visual excess has fallen away. Allen's image appears in black and white, landing on a truth that doesn’t need bells or whistles: the affair was about a man’s issues, not her. She’ll be okay, eventually. As she begins to leave the stage, Allen pauses and turns back only briefly to offer the audience a tiny wave that recalls the final moments of Fleabag, and the relationship Phoebe Waller-Bridge created with her audience: Thank you for witnessing me, coming with me, but I’ll be okay. I no longer need you to carry me through it.

When she returns for a bow, accepting flowers with a small curtsy rather than launching into an encore of greatest hits, it feels entirely right. Pop stars do not usually take curtain calls. Actors do.
And that, perhaps, is the point. West End Girl is not interested in recreating the mechanics of a stadium concert. It borrows instead from theatre, art and autobiography to create a production in which every aesthetic choice is carefully considered and beautifully presented.

Women's pain has often been consumed as spectacle or dismissed as oversharing, as though emotional honesty somehow precludes artistic sophistication. West End Girl refuses that false choice. It insists that vulnerability can itself be rigorously constructed, that confession can coexist with theatrical intelligence, and that analysing a woman's work requires more than simply marvelling at how brave she has been.
Brava, Lily.