Thelma & Louise review – musical hoedown is a bland and baffling wrong turn

Young Vic, London
Despite a book by the original screenwriter, this stage adaptation doesn’t have the depth – or the songs – worthy of the era-defining feminist parable. And where’s the car?

‘Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.” These words were written by Mary Shelley two centuries ago but could apply to the two runaways in Ridley Scott’s 1991 film who turn into highway fugitives in their liberating cross-country road trip after a girls’ weekend goes wrong.

Thelma & Louise, starring Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis, did not exactly represent Shelley’s “monstrous feminine” but came to be seen as an era-defining feminist parable on freedom from male strictures and abuse. It caught the cultural zeitgeist, the title becoming a byword for sisterhood, with reams written about its feminist layers, spectacular cinematography – and the shock of its un-Hollywood ending.