Lily Allen at First Direct Bank Arena in Leeds: Strength of songs save stilted West End Girl during defining album show

Staged earlier this year, it offered a track-by-track rendering of the zeitgeist-defining album that charts the collapse of her marriage to Stranger Things actor David Harbour.

Now scaled up for arenas, the show shrugs off some of the early criticism, though it still has a central weakness that’s only papered over by the strength of the material.

Some of what works here really shouldn’t, at least on paper. Foremost is the absence of a live band. String ensemble the Dallas Minor Trio open the show with karaoke versions of some of Allen’s biggest hits.

Audience members gamely sing along as lyrics bounce across the top of the stage, creating a mood that’s halfway between a hen-party and graduation ball. It’s a slightly odd and only partly successful way of capturing the cross-generational appeal she’s found with the release of her fifth album.

The Trio vanish for the main set, replaced by a backing track. It’s a risky move, with Allen effectively taking on the audience’s role as karaoke singer.

Yet the absence of live musicians makes sense within the album’s structured lyric cycle, which centres on her emotional state and isolation. Without the distraction of flamboyant drummers or thrashing guitarists, audience attention remains fixed on the narrative arc.

The same is true of the set list. There’s no element of surprise - no waiting in hope for an obscure B-side to be played – because the album is performed in track order. In place of uncertainty comes emotional investment in Allen’s auto-fictional story.

The venue erupts into pantomime boos when she reaches for a red rotary phone at the end of the title track, her one-sided dialogue with Harbour introducing the album’s central theme of marital collapse.

The use of a phone is part of a wider, highly effective staging that draws on theatre and doubles down on the West End being both beginning and ending: the site of Allen’s career renaissance, and the endpoint of her marriage.

The show largely unfolds inside the confines of a New York apartment - the “nice little rental near a sweet little school” of the title track. Within it, she re-enacts key lyrical moments and emotional shifts, stripping down to her underwear as the songs strip away her defences.

The camera angles are overtly theatrical: Allen sprawls on a chaise longue during ‘Sleepwalking’, staring directly down the lens, while another shot frames her through an open fridge door as she takes a cheeky vape during ‘Relapse’.

Yet while the staging is tremendous, Allen’s performance within is stilted. She may have found success as a stage actor in the likes of 2:22 A Ghost Story, but here she often appears uncomfortable as she totters across the set in vertiginous heels.

There are brief moments when feeling flickers across her face - she looks genuinely broken at the end of the phone call - but for much of the show she remains curiously blank.

Her seeming discomfort continues into the choreography of the dancefloor-adjacent ‘Ruminating’ and ‘Nonmonogamummy’, with her routines feeling awkward rather than expressive.

This stiffness weakens the show on two levels. If Allen is re-enacting emotional crisis - both highs and lows - more of it needs to register in her body language.

If, instead, some scenes are being played for Carry On-style camp, they need sharper comic punctuation: an arched eyebrow when she produces a giant dildo from under the bed during ‘Pussy Palace’, or when a box of Yorkshire Tea appears from the fridge during ‘Nonmonogamummy’. A flicker of a smile does appear at the appearance of the latter, but not quite enough.

In a one-hour show with weaker staging or lesser songs, this stiltedness might prove fatal. Here, buoyed by the strength of the album and the goodwill in the room, Allen just about carries the audience of East End boys and West End girls.