Speed-the-Boos 
 
 The Mean Girls actress-turned-tabloid fodder made her stage debut in David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow in London. It was decidedly not fetch. 
 
 LONDON — Lindsay Lohan only has one major speech in the David Mamet play that marks her West End debut. Unfortunately, she couldn’t remember how it went. 
 
 On the first night of previews, a work-in-progress feel is to be expected. But halfway through the second act of Speed-the-Plow, the audience was openly laughing at Lohan’s struggle to grasp Mamet’s sharp, trademark dialogue. 
 
 After her first audible prompt, which came shortly after the interval, the audience sat patiently. The second led to titters in the stalls. Unfortunately for Lohan, the next line delivered by Richard Schiff (Toby from The West Wing) was: “You have done a fantastic job!” 
 
 The laughter grew louder. 
 
 Although she was sitting staring at a book, which may or may not have contained clues, a third prompt from the wings had Lohan smirking, and she raised her hand to her heart apologetically. By now, even her serious lines were being greeted with laughter. “I know what it is to be bad, I’ve been bad,” her character Karen emotes. More laughter. 
 
 “Oh my god, it’s so embarrassing,” said a woman in the crowd during an unusually long set change. In truth, Lohan remained charming throughout. 
 
 The chaotic second half had not started promisingly when the occupants of the box closest to the stage tipped a glass of champagne over someone in the front row. It ended with a minor wardrobe malfunction as Lohan’s blouse puffed out—untucked—below what was supposed to be a smart new outfit. 
 
 This theatrical debut from Lohan in London, where she claims to have moved for good, marks a modest return to the spotlight after years of court appearances and tales of unrest on set. She has been a regular fixture in the British gossip pages despite a hectic schedule of rehearsals. 
 
 Contrary to some of the Twitter reviews, this was no car crash. If Lohan can nail her lines in the coming days, this somewhat pedestrian interpretation of the Mamet classic certainly could find its stride. The action focuses on the decision-making process of a movie studio hotshot. How do you decide which films to make? How are Hollywood careers forged and broken? 
 
 All of this, of course, has personal echoes for Lohan, a child star who burned out in the public eye. Perhaps her naive but ambitious character, desperate to make it in Los Angeles, has too many resonant lines for the audience to fully forget that this is Lindsay Lohan on stage. 
 
 When she says, breathily, “I’m serious, I’d do anything,” it’s going to be difficult for any audience to keep a straight face. 
 
 For all of Lohan’s discomfort, Schiff revels in Mamet’s edgy, witty lines. His movie producer character, Bobby Gould, is restrained but still crackling with energy. The West Wing alum is by far the best thing in the play. Though a consummate professional and far more gifted actor, Schiff doesn't share the multimillion-dollar Hollywood prospects of Lohan, whether she manages to rebuild her topsy-turvy career or not. ||||| For months it has been considered to be one of the hottest tickets in town. And when Lindsay Lohan made her stage debut in London’s West End on Tuesday night she didn’t disappoint – but for all the wrong reasons. The former child star reportedly had the audience in giggles as she had to be fed lines during the opening night of Speed-the-Plow, and RadarOnline.com has all the details of what one critic called a “total car crash.” 
 
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 According to TheDailyBeast.com the first night of previews went shockingly badly for the 28-year-old former child star, who has been a fixture of the London nightlife circuit in recent weeks. 
 
 Embarrassingly LiLo even had to be fed her lines on several occasions. 
 
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 A reporter for website wrote, “After her first audible prompt, which came shortly after the interval, the audience sat patiently. The second led to titters in the stalls. Unfortunately for Lohan, the next line delivered by Richard Schiff (Toby from The West Wing) was: ‘You have done a fantastic job!’ 
 
 “The laughter grew louder,” the critic wrote. 
 
 Poor Lohan reportedly sat staring at a book – one of the on-stage props – and apparently received a “third prompt from the wings.” 
 
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 This time she smirked. 
 
 Lohan’s lines supposedly prompted laughter even when they weren’t meant to be funny and The Daily Beast quotes one audience member as saying: “Oh my God, it’s so embarrassing.” 
 
 It wasn’t all Lohan’s fault though. During the second half of the performance an audience member in the box closet to the stage split champagne over someone in the front row. 
 
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 While some mistakes are expected in the preview stage of a new production London’s theatergoers can be unforgiving and one took to Twitter to express her disgust. 
 
 She tweeted after the show: “So Lindsay Lohan had her lines written down in a book & also got fed a line. Total car crash.” 
 
 However, Lohan still has time to perfect her performance. 
 
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 London’s theater critics don’t get a chance to officially review the production until press night on October 2. 
 
 In an interview published in the London edition of Time Out earlier this week, Lohan did admit to being nervous and said she has never really appeared in a play before. 
 
 Asked if this was her first time on stage, the actress said, “Erm, I did one: I did Cinderella. I was one of the stepsisters. But I was really young, so no. This is all completely new to me. I know I’m gonna be nervous but everyone’s been so nice.” ||||| The former child star has been more famous for her run-ins with the police and the media than anything else in recent years, but a move to the UK and a London stage debut changed all that 
 
 Sitting in the corner of the bar of the Connaught hotel in Mayfair, wide-eyed, sipping iced water, Lindsay Lohan is telling me in her cracked voice about the latest addiction she is having to suffer cold turkey from. “It was such a diligent thing,” she says, “the schedule was very ritualistic, so not to have that every day has been a really strange feeling. It’s been hard for me to adjust.” 
 
 Her compulsion, now removed from her life, has been to appear on stage eight times a week for three months in David Mamet’s play Speed-the-Plow at the Playhouse theatre, a run that had come to an end a week before we met. Contrary to expectations, she didn’t miss a show (or a cue) and is finding withdrawal tough. She is still talking to the director Lindsay Posner every day, planning her next fix: she is desperate to do another Mamet play with Posner – Oleanna – as early as possible in the new year. 
 
 Lohan, 28, has been acting on screen since her parents (of whom it was once observed “if they were any more low-rent they’d be a spring-break destination”) put her forward for auditions when she was three. The London show is only the second time she has appeared on stage, however – the other was a school production of Cinderella at 13 when, having been cast as an ugly sister rather than the lead (and already a real-life million-dollar-a-movie Disney princess) she walked out after a couple of performances. One of several great things about her latest commitment, she says, is that for three months it removed a question that has dogged her recent life: how to fill the evenings? 
 
 “In LA I didn’t know what to do apart from go out every night,” she says. “That’s when my friends were free. And I would go out and there would be all these cameras there and that’s when it became difficult.” That obsessively documented “difficulty” is shorthand for the literal multiple-car-crash-of-a-life that saw Lohan twice imprisoned for driving under the influence, indicted for fights in nightclubs and for lying to the police, in and out of rehab for drug and alcohol addictions and on almost permanent probation for the last seven years: the ubiquitous cautionary caricature of celeb excess gone bad. At one point in 2011 Lohan was ordered to do a series of 12-hour shifts of community work in the LA county morgue. If the intention of that curious punishment was to give her a sense of her own fragile mortality, the talent she was throwing away, it has taken until this year to finally sink in. 
 
 She herself puts her current sobriety down to a couple of things. Firstly, the intervention and example of the archetypal celebrity fairy godmother, Oprah Winfrey. In the curious double bind of Oprah’s friendship, the counselling sessions she gave Lohan were broadcast to a global TV audience and an intrusive five-part reality show about Lohan’s struggles with life lived in public was aired in the spring. Lohan remains grateful for the last of many “second chances” Oprah offered her. The second strand of her strategy to change her life around was perhaps braver and more radical, however: she moved to London. 
 
 Lohan has lived in the capital for nine months now, has a lease for another year on her flat in the West End, and is currently planning to make it her permanent home. She can’t emphasise enough the liberation the move has given her. “I can go for a run here on my own,” she says. “I do every morning, early, and I think how my friends in New York would still be up partying at that time. I needed to grow up and London is a better place for me to do that than anywhere else.” 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lindsay Lohan (Karen) and Nigel Lindsay (Charlie Fox) in Speed-The-Plow at the Playhouse theatre in London. Photograph: Tristram Kenton 
 
 The defining moment of this shift, she says, came on a holiday she took to Greece in the summer. “It was,” she says, still thrilled at the idea, “the first time I have ever just been on a vacation by myself. I just wandered about on my own! I turned off my phone. It was so extraordinarily freeing for me. Like another life.” The world, which had for so long reflected back to her an ugly image of herself, was suddenly just “out there”. 
 
 “I won’t live in LA again, hell no,” she says. “My friends tell me shit when they come over I don’t want to hear. I don’t even know who got married and who got pregnant. You turn on the news in LA and it is all gossip about people. All the stuff that is going on in the world right now and this gossip is the news?” She laughs. “I love the BBC. I haven’t heard myself mentioned on TV since I have been here. That has been really weird for me, and great.” 
 
 Having moved to London, there was, she says, quickly only one thought in her head: to do a play. She was encouraged to take on the role of Karen in Mamet’s Hollywood satire not only by the playwright himself but also by his friend, Al Pacino. The actor came to see Lohan a couple of nights into her performance and offered her advice throughout the play’s run. 
 
 “He said I know you are going to love this, it will be such a rush for you. He helped me get a routine; I like to meditate a bit before I go on to stage. He warned me the adrenaline you have after is tricky, it’s late and you want to do something. I have let myself go eat, and then I have gone home.” 
 
 The other thing she has learned was that all-important lesson of having to turn up. Having infamously stood up the American justice system on several occasions, she was determined to prove herself able to keep an appointment. “One time I was sick with a bug, I had been vomiting all day, but no way was I going to miss a show. I was sitting there beforehand seeing spots in front of my eyes. I had a plan: if I felt sick on stage I was going to faint, play dead, pretend it was part of the script. Didn’t happen fortunately.” 
 
 The self-imposed disciplines made her feel good about herself for the first time since she can remember, since the early successes of The Parent Trap and Freaky Friday, maybe. “Going on to a film set there have been times when I really hated it,” she says. “When I just wanted to stop and be home. I should have done that, because instead all the court stuff happened.” 
 
 Lohan’s redemptive Hollywood journey from jail to stage would not be complete, of course, without a degree of 12-step wisdom. Oprah gave her a self-help book that has become her bible, The Untethered Soul, by Michael Singer. The book has helped her to shut down the destructive voice in her head, she says, the one that, against her first instincts, told her to get in the car drunk, or turn up late for the court appearance, or to have just one more. “There is a chapter called ‘The Rose and the Thorn’, you sit on a couch, and you imagine that voice in your head as a person next to you. You learn how to distance yourself from that person.” 
 
 Part of her “intention-led” life has been to become involved in a charitable community project in London, the Red Route Cafe in Hackney, which helps young people find a sense of purpose through volunteering. “The kids there know me a bit now,” she says, “and they treat me the same as everyone else. That is so cool for me. In the past I got used to meeting people who would seem like genuine people but often they would have other intentions. There is less of that for me here now.” 
 
 She hasn’t given up on movies, but the immediacy of the stage is something she will not give up lightly. Will we be seeing Lohan doing Shakespeare any time soon? “I would like to do a period piece at least,” she says. “I enjoyed having a British accent when I did Parent Trap so I guess I am halfway there. The way I see it,” she says, a threat and a promise, “the longer I live here the less of a choice you will all have not to hire me for plays… ”
– Spilled champagne and wardrobe malfunctions may sound like a typical Lindsay Lohan night on the town, but this time it happened during her stage debut in London. During her first-night performance in David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow on Tuesday, Lohan—who's "been a fixture of the London nightlife circuit in recent weeks," Radar Online notes—had to be fed lines, kick-starting a flurry of mean girl (and guy) tweets and reviews. "Oh my God, it's so embarrassing," one woman in the crowd piped up during the performance, according to the Daily Beast. The audience seemed to forgive her "first audible prompt," as the Beast calls it, but when she needed a second line read to her, the audience started giggling. It didn't help that co-star Richard Schiff's very next line was "You have done a fantastic job!," followed by a third LiLo snafu and her line: "I know what it is to be bad, I've been bad." As the Beast points out, someone in a box seat did drop champagne on a front-row occupant, and Lohan's blouse billowed out when it wasn't supposed to, which may have aggravated her nervousness in acting on the stage for the first time. Either way, Madonna has to be breathing a sigh of relief. (Oprah wasn't too keen on Lohan's OWN reality show, either.)