The Last Confession - Haymarket Theatre, Wednesday 18th July 2007

Just the thing for a sultry Wednesday night in London – a bit of Catholic-bashing. And not just any old catholics either – this is real Pope on a Rope stuff. Set in the very recent past, this play looks at the backstabbing, deceit, blackmail and Byzantine machinations of the Conclave of Cardinals electing the successor to Pope John, the unexplained death of Pope John Paul I after only 33 turbulent days in office as God’s Vicar and the election to the Pontificate of the previously unheard of man who was crowned John Paul II. Along the way we get every stereotyped kind of cardinal there is – old and fusty, young and ambitious, slimy and deceitful - David Suchet stalking the corridors of power in his red robes, wrestling with his conscience and giving us a bit of his Poirot act thrown in for good measure, earnest young prebends and even a comedy nun (“Would you be wantin’ a cop of coffee Hooly Fadder? Oh go’wan, go’wan, go’wan!” OK, maybe she didn’t say it exactly like that, but she could have done).

Although I did find parts of this very heavy going – the subject matter isn’t frivolous, after all – I was really amazed to read in the programme that this is the author’s first play. You’d never believe it. It’s a little top-heavy at times, but the supporting roles are written very well and nicely integrated, there is just enough comedy to leaven the mix sufficiently to make the whole loaf rise and just enough blasphemy to affront all the good Catholics in the audience. Although there is sometimes some confusion about exactly what the play is – political thriller, murder mystery, heavyweight comedy – it unravels at just the right pace to leave you slightly unsure about where the next few minutes will be leading, with dialogue as intricate and complex as the tiled floor of the Sistine Chapel. There is a sense of discomfiture as well – after all this is the very recent past – and when the name of an obscure German cardinal called Ratzenberger is thrown in unexpectedly during the incessant in-fighting towards the end, this discomfiture slaps you round the face and leaves you with the impression of the Fisherman’s Ring outlined on your cheek (yes, its that Cardinal Ratzenberger); you can almost feel time unfurling and catching up with you. The play also feels astonishingly relevant as it’s about the appointment of a “liberal” pope and his unpopularity with the Catholic Church’s hierarchy, his subsequent “removal” and the enthronement of a Polish replacement whom they hope will be considerably more hard-line (but unfortunately who, as history shows, turns out to be just as liberal as his predecessor. So, when he dies, the Church brings in a Rottweiler who overturns everything that the two John Pauls have worked so hard to achieve. But hey, all for the Glory of Mother Church, eh?).

David Suchet seemed a little uncomfortable at times with his role and even (gasp!) actually fluffed a couple of his lines. There was, unfortunately, quite a lot of his Salieri and his Poirot on stage at times – in fact, in the investigation scene, where the Vatican doctor and various minor Vatican officials are being cross-examined (“Doctor, did you test the coffee in his cup? The sweets in the bowl?”) I half expected him to whip off his skullcap, straighten the ornaments on the table and mutter “But you see, ‘Astings, there was the motive, the method and the opportunity! In fact, the murderer is in zis very room!” In fact, the denouement turns out to be very sub-Christie – Suchet’s confessor turns out to be none other than JP2 himself, which is a bit too neat and tidy. Richard O’Callaghan was a worthy John Paul, with enough of the “son of a Venice bricklayer” about his portrayal to make it believable that he was a man promoted above his ability and outside his range of experience but determined to do what he thought was right, but I doubt very much that the Big JP would ever have participated in the following exchange: JP – “I’m sending you to Florence” Cardinal – “I’d rather go to hell!” JP – “That too can be arranged!”. I thought Maroussia Frank could have done a little more with her Nun than play it as Mrs. Doyle from “Father Ted” and I noticed that her accent slipped a couple of times.

Lighting was effective, if slightly badly sourced at times, leaving some of the actors’ faces in shadows. The set was very well done, representing (I suppose) rooms within rooms and doors within doors as a way of commenting on the endless political wangling going on inside them – or maybe it was “There are many mansions in my fathers house” (or whatever the quote is). I did think, however, that some of these doors ended up being practically superfluous as they didn’t seem to be used much. And I do very much doubt that they use chrysanthemums in the Vatican Gardens. The choice of music was rather odd – with 2000 years of Christian music to choose from, the use of what sounded like Enya seemed very strange.

All in all, an interesting and absorbing play about earthly power and its use and abuse, but showing the odd fault here and there. Not bad for a beginner though, even if he is 61 years old. But he’s not as old as some of the recent popes have been, so there’s time for him to work on his craft yet.

Interestingly, there were three Catholic priests in the audience. I’d give three Hail Mary’s and a Hello Dolly to know what they thought of the evening!

What the critics thought:

http://www.musicomh.com/theatre/last-confession_0707.htm

http://www.londontheatre.co.uk/londontheatre/reviews/lastconfession07.htm

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/theatre/show-23366247-details/The+Last+Confession/showReview.do?reviewId=23395594

The Inland Sea - Rose Bruford College at Greenwich Theatre - Friday 16th June 2007

BROWN’S BROTHER BUGGERED BUCOLICALLY!

Sometimes, you go to see a play which is so up its own arse that sitting through it becomes a chore in itself, at which point one’s critical “capabilities” switch off and it becomes impossible to see the performances because the play keeps getting in the way, so I offer my apologies should anyone connected with this production read this review. I also try and promise not to waffle on interminably about the many errors in the text in terms of the gardening history aspect of the play.

This was the final performance of the Rose Bruford College season of performances, so the house was full of talent (not all of it on the stage) and there was more than a hint of “end of term show” about the place – whooping and laughing and patting each other on the back, and filled with the slightly ribald type of laughter you get when people see their school chums on the stage doing naughty things – as well as the type when the audience know the performers and laugh at the performances rather than any inherent funniness of the play. We went to see this because, on the face of it, it seemed to be about the great 18th century landscape designer Lancelot “Capability” Brown – one of my personal household gods. I think both of us were expecting a play like Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia”, but what we got was an interminable piece of pretentious wank (literally) which had me shifting in my seat and glancing at my watch every five minutes or so in case there was still time for a couple of cards of bingo if we left quickly enough.

The premise of the play (which sank practically without trace after its professional premiere – one wonders why?) is that “Capability” Brown helps his younger, randier brother gain a major landscaping commission, which involves relocating a village. The villagers object to this, leading to confrontations between the villagers themselves and the army cadets employed on the digging. During the excavations in the park, human bones are unearthed. The Gamekeeper who (it proves) did the dastardly deed, is constantly bothered by a strange girl running around the stage like a hyperactive Ophelia. She turns out to be the ghost of the sister of one of the villagers, whom her mother has told for many years that her father and sister suddenly decided to emigrate one night. The gamekeeper has (for some reason unexplained) kept the murdered girl’s skull and therefore she cannot rest until it has been interred with the rest of her bones. During all this, Asquith Brown is seduced by the murdered girl’s sister, taught how to wank effectively by his older brother and then comprehensively fingered up the arse by the girl. An irritating lady with an easel and palette wanders in and out, complaining that she cannot paint a landscape which is in a constant state of flux (the character is not actually called “Mrs. Blantantly Obvious Cypher” but she could well have been). Stretch all this out over 3 hours and you have exactly the kind of evening which ends with me coming out of the theatre “with that face on”. Hey, I could have been watching “Britain’s Got Talent” all night – that’s why I was pissed off. Really. Performing budgies and chavs from Erith and Wembley trying to prove they’re the next Celine Dion, all introduced by comedy geniuses (cough) Ant and Dec would have entertained me more.

Sure, there were some good performances on the stage. Jessica Brown was a wonderfully earthy (in every sense of the word – most of the cast looked as if they had just finished rolling around in the midden) Ellen. Laura Doherty maintained the difficult part of Hesp with style, although her accent was more Jane Horrocks than Jane Austen. Joseph Greenslade obviously has a great future ahead of him – primarily as a Baldrick stand-in (if at any point in the evening he had turned to the audience and said “My Lord, I have a cunning plan” then I suspect he would have been washed off the stage as the audience collectively pissed themselves with delighted hysterics). And Janice Burne was wonderfully detached as the exasperated lady painter. But the play kept getting in the way and I couldn’t wait for it to be over. Until you actually fathom what is going on (its eventually spelled out for you so pointedly that it’s a wonder the text doesn’t call for a drum roll and cymbals at this point), Lena Kaur’s Bliss is just an irritating and baffling interruption. The juxtaposition of low comedy (think of some of Shakespeare’s most strained “hilarious moments”), high falutin’ sentiment and sheer “what the fuck is going on-ism” gets very wearying very quickly. And I’m sorry, but the constant references to sexual activity are either just the mark of a very jejune playwright trying to shock or one who needs a damned good screwing to release some tension. I’m no prude about sex, but when its presented gratuitously just for effect, then I start feeling a bit like Mary Whitehouse and go into spitting-feathers mode. If anyone can tell me exactly why Asquith Brown slips off his breeches and masturbates furiously (in accordance with the extremely graphic “rules of play” recounted by his elder brother) in the middle of a field,, then apparently willingly goes on his hands and knees in order to get comprehensively buggered by a woman using her fingers, or why a genteel lady painter in panniers suddenly feels it necessary to publicly lick the right nipple of a filthy villager actually achieves in terms of characterisation or plot, then please do jot it down on a postcard and let me know (thought: does she have nostalgie de a boué (dreams of the dirt) fantasies? No, she’s just been railing about how the extensive earthworks have turned her bucolic landscape into 11 acres of mud. Geddit? Has the author hit you hard enough with this metaphor yet?).

Mix all this in with coco-roju samba music interspersed with “didley deedly didelly dee dee de doo” sub-Riverdance vocals and scenes which are over in less than a minute involving hysterical girls a la Mad Margaret, comedy yokels with alarming facial hair dressed in costumes so obviously and regularly sponge-printed all over with grey-green “mud” by the costume department that they begin to appear like the worst stencilling excesses of Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen ("don’t turn the sponge round, girls! Otherwise your “mud” won’t look like a repeating pattern!”) and you have an evening which would give any self-respecting landscape architect the screaming ab-dabs. There must be better plays than this for young actors to be in, surely?

And “Capability” Brown never worked with any of his family on landscape projects. And didn’t have a brother called Asquith. He designed 200 or so estates, not 50. “Alnick” is pronounced “Annick” not “All-nick”. The "rare pine trees" you were planting were wretched Cupressus leylandii from B&Q's garden centre. And William Chambers’ “Dissertation on Oriental Gardening” wasn’t published until 1772, and was not a critique on the landscape movement. So there.

What the critics thought: not a lot, as I couldn't find a single review other than mine - not even in the local paper!

Into The Woods – Linbury Studio Theatre, Royal Opera House, Friday 15th June 2007

This has to be my favourite Stephen Sondheim show ever, so it really can’t fail to tick all the boxes with me. And yet….and yet…. there seemed to be something lacking from this production. I can’t exactly put my finger on what it was –a certain lack of “sparkle” perhaps, or a sense of magic. OK, it was the first preview and maybe the cast hadn’t really got into their stride, but parts of this felt very pedestrian and somewhat laboured. Maybe the production is a bit too reverent – with something like this, I think you can get away with playing around and having fun, poking fun at the fairy-tale genre and sending it up, a bit like a really good panto. Certainly I expected something more from the director, Will Tuckett – an established choreographer and dancer with the Royal Ballet. Perhaps that’s what it is – sometimes these people just can’t “cross over” from one discipline to another. Maybe Tuckett should stick with what he knows best – choreography rather than direction. There were many opportunities for dance and “movement” which went completely for nothing. Certainly Tuckett can’t group people effectively, preferring the straight line, the semi-circle and the amorphous “clump”. Halfway through I thought of the great fairytale illustrator Arthur Rackham and how well he grouped characters in his wonderful drawings – perhaps I’ll send Mr. Tuckett a book of his illustrations. Lots of opportunities for “business” were missed completely, and although I loved the mechanical hen running across the stage, loathed the inclusion of a guide dog for Clorinda and Florinda, thought the fact that Cinderella’s birds came down the chimney while there was a lighted fire in the grate absurd and didn’t think much of either Milky-White splitting in half or Cinderella’s Prince galumphing around with a horse’s armoured headpiece held in front of him to represent his steed. In order for the potion to work, Red Riding Hood’s cape MUST be fed to the cow (and wasn’t), and neither should Jack be carrying his sack of coins when he says to the Baker “I will go and get more money”. Mr. Tuckett obviously hadn’t paid enough attention to the details of the script, and I thought that the changes required to the characters’ houses between the acts were not nearly marked enough. Jack’s mother would have spent money on gaudy stuff from the fairytale equivalent of the Argos catalogue when becoming rich rather than just buying a tasteful cuckoo clock and some dangly ear-rings and Cinderella’s house became Cinderella’s castle with the very lazy addition of a carved royal crest above the fireplace.

Lighting was rather unsure throughout the entire evening – much seemed very underlit and a lot of the singers seemed to be either singing completely out of their spot or unsure of where it was going to be. The stage was framed with mirrors and only once did I see these being used – Cinderella’s Prince used one to check his hair. Mirrors reflect the unvarnished truth and Tuckett could have made a nice point here – a lot of characters in this show are self-deluded and only find truth and reality in the second act. And mirrors do feature in a lot of fairy stories, either as a plot device or a character (or both). And only once did I catch the mirrors being used to enhance the lighting – and that I think by mistake – when a spot beam seemed angled precisely to catch on the edge of one of the mirrors and bounce to a different angle on the floor of the stage.

Gary Waldhorn seemed rather to be going through the motions as the Narrator and would sometimes appear right in the middle of the action – surely the point of having a Narrator is that he takes a role completely outside the story (even though in this show he does eventually get dragged almost literally into the story he is telling). Certainly I think he could have been given a rather better costume – he looked like he’d just strolled in off the street in an unpressed jacket and trousers that had obviously been bought in his slightly slimmer days. And please, makeup designer, get someone to put some powder on his bald bonce so that he doesn’t look like a big pink shiny easter egg wandering around the stage.

Gillian Kirkpatrick seemed somehow better as the scullerymaid Cinderella than Princess Cinderella, lacking innocence and a certain emotional warmth and certainly not singing with the brilliance that Cinders should possess. “On The Steps of the Palace” is incredibly difficult to sing but I have heard other actresses manage this far better. I thought Peter Caulfield made a splendid Jack, although his diction was sometimes a little muddy. The director, however, should point out to him that when holding a chicken, its head should face the audience, not its arse, even if it does lay golden eggs. Anne Reid did her best with the small part of Jack’s Mother, although I did think it might have been somewhat lazy casting. It’s a difficult role – there’s not much singing but what there is, is quite tricky and wordy and Im not totally convinced Ms. Reid could get her teeth round some of it. Cinderella’s Stepmother is another of these roles and Elizabeth Brice failed on all counts. No projection to her dialogue, muddy diction in the music and generally not nearly wicked enough. Louise Bowden and Lara Pulver did their best with the roles of her awful daughters and certainly looked and sang the parts, but again came over as just too much on the silly side rather than being genuinely spiteful. When the script says “slap”, girls, it means “slap” and not “dab at ineffectually”. Martin Nelson was practically inaudible during the Mysterious Man’s dialogue but then pulled an astonishingly splendid voice out of thin air for his one duet. If he’d bought this out from under his hat during his dialogue, it would have made the role seem much more prominent.

Suzanne Toase was a wonderful Little Red Riding Hood straight from the Ridings of East Yorkshire, even though she is obviously well over the playing age of the part. Great line delivery and a nice awareness of the latent sexuality that the story of Red Riding Hood and the wolf is really all about. Linda Hibberd, taking the three small parts of Cinderella’s Mother, Granny and the giantess was disappointing in all of them. She failed to appear on stage in the first (when a ghostly presence is really required, was all but inaudible in her dialogue and not nearly bloodthirsty enough in the second and voiced the latter without any real feeling. Also disappointing was Christina Haldane as Rapunzel – sure she can sing the coloratura proficiently enough but seemed physically uncomfortable with the acting and failed to bring any kind of projection to her dialogue. What bits I could hear were so overlaid with Indiana accent as to make them impenetrable.

Byron Watson should have been playing the Steward but there were apparently some last minute problems with casting and he took the role of Cinderella’s Prince instead – and showed that he wasn’t really capable of doing so, showing no panache whatsoever, little charm, minimal sex appeal and absolutely no feeling for dialogue. He also made a rather effete Wolf. The chap who took the role of the Steward (didn’t catch his name) did an incredibly good job with a very minor part and made far more impression than this character ever does – he’s probably the best Steward I’ve ever seen. I’ve always thought that the role of Rapunzel’s Prince is the inferior of the two princes, but I’ve seen a couple of good amateur performers make this role one of the funniest in the show and Nic Greenshields also managed this with a great feeling for the throwaway dialogue, impeccable comedy timing and mugging about the stage wonderfully.

Clive Rowe as the Baker was singularly unimpressive in the role and seemed incapable of bringing any kind of vocal strength to his part. He also showed a very annoying tendency to flap his hands about when any kind of emoting was required. Beverley Kline was fabulous as the Witch, scuttling about the stage like a bedraggled old hen in Act One but seemed somehow to lose her focus on the part both in terms of characterisation and delivery of dialogue after her transformation back into a glamorous woman. Much of the time, her singing was rather too “Opera” than the role actually demanded and her delivery of “The Last Midnight”, which should be a bravura showstopper and wasn’t, meant that I was left with the impression of a slightly defective firework – sometimes giving out a loud “phut” and a damp puff of smoke rather than expected shower of pyrotechics. The problem is that Bernadette Peters, who created the role on Broadway, remains the definitive Witch for me and nobody has ever even come close to the perfection of her portrayal. Yay Bernie!

All the honours of the evening go to Anna Francolini’s stunning and practically faultless portrayal of The Baker’s Wife. Her dialogue was spot on throughout the entire show, her diction impeccable, her characterisation brilliant, her comedy timing perfect and her musical delivery without peer – much as it pains me to say this, she was an even better Baker’s Wife than Imelda Staunton, which is compliment indeed. The role could have been written for her, in fact.

A rather uneven evening, in summary, with some surprisingly poor casting for the Opera House. And for pity’s sake – this is a brand new performance space and STILL there was insufficient leg room!

What the critics thought:

http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117933944.html?categoryid=33&cs=1

http://arts.independent.co.uk/music/reviews/article2682482.ece

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/theatre/show-23367363-details/Into+The+Woods/showReview.do?reviewId=23401154

The Three Musketeers – Northern Ballet Theatre, Sadler’s Wells, Tuesday 5th June

I LOVED the bit where Tom’s tabard rolls up like a roller blind and the loose end whacks him under the chin several times….. oh no, that’s something quite different. Maybe it was the bit where the little grey French mouse waves his sword and says “Bonjour, Monsieur Pusseeycat!”. Oh no, that wasn’t in it either. What a shame.

This was far, far better than NBT’s risible “Peter Pan” from a couple of years back, but bears all the same hallmarks of an expensive, worthy flop. At least we were spared a Japanese chap called “Preter Pran” asking us to “crap your hands if you bereave in fairlys” – but it seems impossible to keep these dancers fully silent on stage. Ballet doesn’t need whooping and wailing and screaming, guys! And frankly, last night I saw very little to whoop about. In fact, for the first 10 minutes, I saw very little – this production is so underlit as to make much of it, including the set-up of the vastly complicated plot, practically incomprehensible, particularly as much of the plot turns on enormous numbers of individuals putting on long hooded cloaks and creeping/running/dancing across the stage in the gloom. Maybe they were doing “The Three Musketeers Go Down The Mines” and I never noticed. The lighting man seemed to be suffering from “Gobo-mania” (a gobo is a sort of stage light that casts a pattern on the stage or backdrop) and was using his full stock, trying out all the vile colour combinations that he’d not been able to use on other productions. Ever. He was obviously given a nudge by someone after 10 minutes or so, because then some decent lighting was used, but you can’t keep a good gobo down and by the end, they were all back again

Bad lighting doesn’t help either when two of your principals – The Queen of France and Constance, the washerwoman’s spunky daughter – are exactly the same height and build, have exactly the same hairdo and are wearing practically the same costume for much of the evening. Several times I confused the two and wondered “What on earth is the Queen of France doing waving scissors around and climbing out of windows?”. Neither does it help for D’Artagnan’s father to skip the make-up so that he looks of an age with his son – during the scene when they were rolling around half-naked with each other I wondered whether this was a gay subplot to the story I hadn’t heard of before. When I worked out what was going on, I thought “Well, if my dad looked like that I’d be sorry to leave home as well”. The corps of Jolly Washerwomen were obviously suffering from the same mystery illness as the peasants from the dreadful West End musical of “Martin Guerre” some years ago – one which brings permanent cleanliness, scrubbed faces and not a hair out of place. The woman playing the evil Milady (oh, wassname’s got red hair, she can be the evil one) prowled about the stage mugging like Madame Thenardier on speed, and in fact the final scene at the ball when Milady is scrabbling round the ballroom, chasing several identical jewellery cases, none of which prove to hold the stolen necklace, reminded me very much of both the scene in Les Mis when the Thenardiers are caught stealing the cutlery and the opening sequence of “Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom”. The chap playing the thankless part of Richelieu had nothing to do but stalk around the stage like an animated ironing board draped in bri-nylon crimson robes. No characterisation (and basically no role either, poor bugger). The Washerwoman, Madame de Brillopad or something, wasn’t even fat – and it’s a narrative necessity that “Comedy Washerwomen Should Always Be Fat”. Did the Director never read “The Wind in the Willows”, for pete’s sake?

The Three Musketeers themselves, usually known as Athos, Porthos and Aramis, would better have been named Arsehole (the thick one), Port-hole (the fat one) and Hi-Karate (the Japanese one) as this is how they were portrayed. Some nice characterisation but mere swagger does not a Musketeer make, chaps. There was also some excellent stage fighting but was ALWAYS preceded by all four standing in a half circle with one arm raised behind their back like a scorpion tail and the tips of their rapiers touching in the classic “All for one….” “and one for All!” stance, which got a bit tedious by the ninth time.

Scenery was generally good (where it could be seen) – there were a couple of lovely sets representing Versailles in all its rococo-mirrored-chocolate-boxishness – but a lot of them seem to have been created using scaled-up versions of painting-by-numbers kits. There was one lovely moment when, intending to exit through the secret door in the Queen’s panelled boudoir, Constance picks the wrong section of the wall and walks right into it (shame that there weren’t two doors, one of which opened into a broom-cupboard).

As to narrative thrust, I felt that many of the initial scenes, and a good many of the later ones, were unnecessarily scamped in order to make time for long pas des deux – Constance and D’Artagnan had THREE, for goodness’ sake. There were also far too many “scenes” which consisted of mysterious cloaked people just scampering across the stage. The scene in which “A Room in England” was indicated by the Union Jack waving proudly from the back of a galleon had me giggling because the Union Jack didn’t come into being until at least 300 years after this period – if not longer. By the time the Bloody Queen of France had got her Bloody Necklace back I had long ceased to care who ended up with the Damn Thing. I got the impression that most of the very thin audience felt the same way. What the whole thing needed was an anvil, a collapsing ironing board, accordions going Waa waaa waaaa waaaaaaaa…..and a fat black woman shouting “Thamas! Thamas!” while trying to hit Jerry with a Kentucky mop. That's All, Folks!

What the critics thought:

http://www.britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/NBT3musketeers-rev.htm

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/theatre/show-23362693-details/Northern+Ballet+Theatre:+The+Three+Musketeers/showReview.do?reviewId=23399577

The Drowsy Chaperone – Novello Theatre, Monday 28th May 2007

I would quite happily parade up and down Covent Garden in a sandwich-board reading “Go and see this show!” If you’re looking for comedy, escapism, cynicism, observative wit or just pretty costumes and a set you can come out humming – what are you waiting for? Hurry along and get your ticket now – because a wonderful treat is awaiting you.

“The Drowsy Chaperone” is basically one of those ridiculous, unbelievable, kitsch Broadway shows of the type that use French windows with stylised garden backdrops, packaged in a new and interesting and entertaining way. The curtain rises to total darkness – even the house lights go off completely. A few seconds of silence, during which the shifting and muttering of the audience can be heard. A nasal, slightly whiny Canadian voice addresses us through the darkness: “Do you always pray during those seconds before curtain-up?” The audience laughs, slightly discomforted. “I mean, you never know exactly what you’re letting yourself in for, do you? Do you sit there and think ‘Oh Elton John, when are you going to give up this charade….’” And we’re off….. After a few more minutes of slightly camp bon mots, the lights go up to reveal The Man in the Chair (we never find out what his real name is) – middle aged, scrawny, wearing a baggy cardigan of the type best described as “comfy”. A one room apartment which has seen better days – single pull down bed, Baby Belling cooker, a standard lamp, a record player…… yes, a record player. The Man in The Chair is a Broadway Musical officianado* – but only of those shows so old and obscure that they appear on vinyl. His favourite is a rare recording of a show called “The Drowsy Chaperone”. He listens to it when he’s feeling “blue”. Its comforting, like an old friend. Would we like to hear it? The audience make encouraging but vague noises. Nobody on stage addresses the audience – unless it’s a Very Bad Tennessee Williams Play (see review of The Lady of Dubuque). You would? Wonderful. Now, listen and imagine…….as the music starts, the stage lights change the double doors of the fridge fly open and in come two butlers and two housemaids, carrying old suitcases and bunches of flowers and singing and dancing their way around the stage. The Man in the Chair looks on excitedly. What a show this is going to be!

More than that I won’t say, as it might spoil the enjoyment of anyone yet to see the show. I defy anyone to see this and not be entertained. Both of us were initially quite suspicious – its another show without an interval (See review of A Matter of Life and Death) and its only 90 minutes. But there is a reason for the lack of interval, which is so neatly integrated into the show that you neither notice it or miss it – and I think would rather resent it if there were one.

Like the great 18th century landscape gardens or an episode of “The Simpsons”, you can enjoy this show on several levels. If you don’t understand the “In Jokes” and references, that’s no problem at all. It’s still great. But if you have even the most passing acquaintance with the classic musicals of stage and screen, you’ll enjoy it all the more, as references to and satires on many of these (both subtle and subtle-as-a-brick) positively litter the script. I spotted “Kiss Me, Kate”, “The Boyfriend”, “Crazy for You”, “Thoroughly Modern Millie”, “Anything Goes”, “Flying Down to Rio” (the Busby Berkely film), “Me and My Girl”, “My Fair Lady”, “42nd Street”, “Phantom of the Opera”, bad gay porn films and “Singin’ in the Rain” – and there is a uproariously funny nod to “The King and I” which must have cost a fortune and which I still can’t think about without grinning with delight (the fact that Elaine Paige, playing “The Emperor of China’s Elocutionist” and wondering in song about the differences between “Asians and Caucasians” played Mrs. Anna in a terribly overblown production of this at the Palladium about 8 years ago was not lost on me or several other members of the audience either).

As “The Drowsy Chaperone” is a “classic Broadway show”, we get all the requisite items. Hunky leading man with that Colgate Smile (we find out that the actor “playing” him used to advertise cocaine-flavoured toothpaste) a la John Barrowman, leggy leading lady, comedy ingénue, two gangsters in disguise, comedy foreigner, once-great-and-still-clinging-onto-showbiz older woman in part designed to show off her fading skills off sympathetically, humorous butler (secretly in love with aforementioned woman), tapdancing servants, comedy duet, love duet, plaintive moonlight ballad, big dance routine to end “Act One”, romantic complications of complete banality and a happy-ever-after finale. The unexpected bonus is that this is all packaged in a witty, acidic, heartbreaking framework of narration by The Man in the Chair. As the “finale of Act 2” hits its climax…….no, go and see it yourself and find out.

The casting was excellent throughout. This is an ensemble piece and it would be unfair to pick holes in individual performances. Summer Strallen (great name, eh?) was everything and more you want from a musical comedy heroine – beauty, wit, legs up to her eyebrows and a fabulous delivery (her “Show Off” has got to be the best number I’ve seen on stage for a long time), John Partridge her “John Barrowman” - perhaps not up to the very best vocal standards but hey, can you dance a waltz on roller skates? You can? Blindfolded? No, me neither. Selina Chiltern was equally fab as the comedy ingenue’s comedy ingénue – ditzy and titsy to the max. Joseph Allessi was stunningly funny as the “comedy foreigner” and shows the performance of the chap playing this stock role in “A Matter of Life and Death” for the tatty, laboured, lazy, desperately unfunny thing it is. Allessi could probably out-comedy foreigner the entire cast of Allo, Allo.

And Elaine Paige – oh yes, Elaine Paige is in it, I nearly forgot. Amazingly, she really doesn’t make that much impact – and I mean that in the nicest possible way. All the roles are written and blended so well, both in terms of stage time and effect, that no one individual dominates the show. She plays the title role as a parody of Elaine Paige really. You know, the brassy, Broadway chanteuse with the big rousing solo number 2/3 of the way through Act One. Perhaps her “big belt” in this number was a bit underpowered but our opinions differed here. I thought she might be saving herself for opening night next week, CBB thought she’s a little past her prime and was giving it all she had left. Go and see it yourself and decide.

The pivotal role of the Man in the Chair was taken by the show’s writer, Bob Martin (no chocolate for dogs jokes please). And he was fantastic. No other word will really do. He draws you into his sad little fantasy world with charm and wit and self-deprecating humour (and I do like a nice bit of self-deprecating humour). You really get to like him. He creates a truly believable waspish, loveable, middle-aged-Musicals-queen and you rejoice in his happiness at the end. The sets were wonderfully, endlessly inventive and perfect. There’s even a “drawing room” cloth for the Butler and Mrs. Tottington scene, which is exactly what would be on stage during the number for these two characters if it were a “proper” show – you know, they stand in front of it on a small strip of stage for 10 minutes or so while the chorus take a break, change costumes and snatch a well-earned fag and the stagecrew make a complicated set change. Wonderful, wonderful stuff. The perfect antidote to all the “worthy but dull”, “mega-musical with leading role given to someone who won it on a television programme”, “based on career of 80s pop group/dreadful film loved by chav girls/naff American TV series” stuff on in the West End at the moment. Curtain down by 9.45pm, which means you don’t have to fight all the other theatregoers for a seat on the train – but that’s an added bonus. Go and see it yourself. I’ve said that several times during the course of this review. But just in case you didn’t hear me – go and see it yourself. You’ll be awfully glad that you did.

*Any similarity with the recent life of Mr. C. Bebee is hotly denied by the author

A Matter of Life and Death – National Theatre, Friday 26th May 2007

24 hours after seeing this, I still can’t work out whether I loved it or loathed it – whether it was an affront on a much loved and classic film by a troupe of circus acrobats and clowns or whether it was a bold experiment in physical theatre intended to bring new life to a faded story and a new audience to the National. I’m sure all my readers are a cultivated and intelligent lot, but I will recap the story briefly as I suspect the review will not make much sense without it. Peter, a WW2 pilot, is shot down returning from a bombing raid on a foggy night over the channel. He makes radio contact with June, a radio operator back at base who attempts to talk him down. Peter bails out without a parachute and should, logically, die in the attempt. However, the angel sent to fetch him misses him in the fog – and in heaven, the Recording Angel finds she is a soul short. The angel is sent back to earth to collect him – but Peter and June have met and fallen in love. The angel reports back and is told that Peter will be allowed to plead his case in the Court of Heaven to continue living. Defence and Prosecution state their arguments – but ultimately it all comes down to the toss of a single coin; heads he wins, tails he loses. Which way will the coin fall?

What I loved about this production was its physical inventiveness. The company wisely didn’t try to present a metaphysical question in a literal way. Instead, on a starry circle of stage, lit from above with torches, four hospital beds, four upside down bicycles (being pedalled by four upside down nurses), four blazing dustbins and a spinnaker-shaped flight of metal stairs became a Lancaster bomber hurtling down through the clouds. Atop a column a man in pyjamas plays with a paper aeroplane. A vast cyclorama of empty sky and a couple of buckets of sand become a lonely, windswept beach. Two sets of the stairs become the bank “where the wild thyme blows” in the hospital production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, atop which sit Titania and her fairies in the shape of nurses dressed in floral curtains. A pair of carpet slippers become Bottom’s ears. A hospital bed becomes a garden swing, and four of them become the iconic stairway upon which Peter and June scramble depending on which face of the huge, slowly spinning coin above the stage currently faces front (there are a lot of hospital beds in this production – and indeed Heaven is portrayed as some kind of glorious recuperation ward in which the “patients” lounge around in their jimjams, eating sweets from ever-refilling paper bags and being watched over by efficient yet kindly nurses, with white starched headdresses taking the place of wings). The ping pong match is played with a white tennis ball, which is fixed to the end of a 10 foot black pole, which is swung from side to side by one of the ever-present nurses/angels. The doctor’s fatal motorbike ride through the storm is represented by a tiny model motorbike, complete with rider and headlight, being pushed around the stage by a “patient”. And in the final scene, the seated ranks of the audience become the hushed galleries of onlookers as the Judge sums up. All of this I loved.

Now for the things I didn’t. I hated the fact that the company tried to turn this into a musical. Introducing “comic” songs into this piece is just wrong. Music yes, but songs no – particularly irritating was the one sung by “Bottom” called “Now that I’m Dead”, which wasn’t funny, wasn’t relevant and wasn’t even particularly well sung, notwithstanding the fact that I thought it in extremely poor taste. The onstage band and singer provided music which was completely out of touch with the piece, being too loud, too intrusive, brash and of completely the wrong style and period. I hated the fact that the villagers shown on the “camera obscura” owned by the doctor (a “camera obscura” is a small darkened room with a round table in the centre. In the middle of the ceiling is a hole, through which light enters. By a cunning contrivance of lenses, images of the outside world are projected down onto the table. Turning a handle at the side of the table rotates the lenses, so the “projector” can rotate through 360 degrees) were presented as if they were walking around modern-day Waterloo, with the London Eye and the riverfront. I loathed the fact that some of the characters and scenes were turned into little more than circus acts – and unfunny circus acts at that. I hated the fact that there was no interval – perhaps the company were trying to present the piece in a “filmic” style but two solid hours is a long time without an interval at the theatre. I bet the theatre bar manager had something to say about that.

Individual performances were, on the whole, average. Tristan Sturrock made a likeable Peter, but David Niven he ain’t, love. Douglas Hodge was an affable and believable Frank, Lindsey Marshall played June as just that little bit too common for my liking. Andy Williams played Dr. McEwan as the kind of camp, affected twat that I thought died along with the music hall. Chike Okonkwo obviously failed to realise that, in the 1940’s, surgeons were upper class and spoke well, even if they were black. And Mike Shepherd played Harold (and “Bottom”) in such an irritating and whiny fashion that I longed to be rid of him and his bloody carpet slipper ears. By far the most unlikeable portrayal was that of “Conductor 71” – the angel sent to collect Peter from his burning plane (he's Icelandic and his name is completely un-typeable on a normal keyboard!). Gone was the polite decorum of Marius Goring (in the film version) as the French aristocrat beheaded in the Revolution – what we got was a Norwegian trapeze artist/magician/circus clown/“comedian” who apparently died during a misjudged escapology performance centring round a vat of milk. This presumably was changed in order to give an aspect of “theatricality” (and allow for lots of desperately unfunny “comedy” - this was as funny as a five-day old rollmop herring on a piece of dry Ryvita and was very, very wearing by the end of the evening - and lots of rope climbing and abseiling). CBB has recently posited the theory that he was dressed to look like Borat and is a parody of him (can one parody a parody?) in order to give some kind of "cultural reference point" for the bored teenagers dragged by their Niven-loving parents.

CBB loathed much of the piece (it is, after all, based on a classic film – one that he’s never seen but about which he nonetheless feels himself qualified to expound on) and the fact that the script was apparently developed through the rehearsal period rather than being learned from the page (“This is NOT the sort of thing that should be seen at The National Theatre – it should be done for ten pence in a church hall somewhere”. PROPER the-atre, of course (preferably starring Judi Dench in a farthingale, Donald Sinden in a pantouffle, or Helen Mirren with her baps out – or all three, if possible, maybe in something obscure by Euripedes in a translation by Moliere) is the ONLY kind of the-atre suitable for the hallowed stages of The National. I just laughed and called him a “reactionary old fart”.

And finally, a note on that ever-spinning coin. At this performance, it came down “heads – you win”. But from one of the “proper” reviews I’ve heard about, the ending really does depend on the spin of a single coin and might just as well have come down “tails – you lose”. The problem is, I’m not really sure I could sit through the show again in order to find out. I’ll stick with my DVD of the film. At least you get the fabulous moving staircase, David Niven, James Robertson “What’s the Bleeding Time?” Justice and a notable lack of rollmop.

OLIVER! - a post script

My review of this seems to have touched raw nerves of at least two of the company, by the sound of the comments left on this posting. Can I just refer those two people back to the header at the top of the main blog page? These comments are "my uninformed opinions". I am not a professional critic and merely say what I think. I could be sharp and say something like "If you're not prepared to take criticism, then don't pursue a leisure activity which invites same" but I won't. As a performer myself, I've had criticism levelled at some of my performances, some of which has hurt a great deal. But the first rule of responding to criticism is: DON'T.