The Rake's Progress

I'm going to have to stop attending revivals, at least until Alzheimer's kicks in, because my memory is still good enough to make bad comparisons. Anyone marginally less than a hundred and six probably hasn't seen (Sir) Alan Ayckbourn's 1986 play Woman in Mind or, if they have, didn't retain that experience as a pivotal episode in their theatregoing life.

The plot is simple enough: desperate housewife whacks herself on the head with a garden rake, and awakes to an invented world of more charming relatives and a posher house. The staged juxtaposition of her idealised fantasy and disappointing real life eventually overlap in a surreal climax as she goes quietly off her head.



What's clever is that this marked Ayckbourn's transition from a writer of frothy comedies suitable for amateurs and provincial repertory companies into a real playwright with issues to expose and a range of techniques which went beyond staging two plays side by side in different auditoria (House and Garden) or three overlapped stories in consecutive plays (The Norman Conquests) by exploring the fourth dimension, with the shift of time and conception - first in Woman in Mind, and subsequently in Henceforward, Communicating Doors and Comic Potential.

It also used first person narrative, with the female protagonist speaking directly to the audience, a year before Willy Russell wrote Shirley Valentine.

In 1986, it signalled the transition of Julia McKenzie from musical comedy and TV sitcoms to character acting, as despite Ayckbourn's reservations about the casting, she gave what is still considered the performance of her career, and won an Evening Standard best actress award.

Fast Forward (that's probably another Ayckbourn play title) to 2009 and Susan is now played by the entirely excellent Janie Dee, and her compelling likeability places the audience directly on Susan's side which makes it tougher for the 'real' characters - dull Vicar husband, torch-carrying local doctor, and lumpen sister-in-law to gain much ground, or any trust that their version of events is more accurate than Susan's.

This is further hampered in the current production by the casting of perfectly good actors as husband Gerald or doctor Bill - but they're rather ordinary-looking and not known in the West End and it's hard to see what Janie Dee's character would find attractive in either of them. McKenzie was supported by Martin Jarvis and Peter Blythe, and in the replacement cast, Pauline Collins was matched with Michael Jayston and Ralph Bates.

The current under-casting seems to be a fault of many Bill Kenwright shows, but usually only to minor characters, here - despite the credit crunch - in a cast of 8 it seems unnecessary cheese-paring.

The revival is directed by Sir Alan Ayckbourn himself, and it feels too reverential as the production lacks pace and the frenetic climax isn't nearly surreal or bizarre enough.

Times have changed, we need our madness with more special effects.

High School, Musical

review of Spring Awakening at the Lyric Hammersmith

Limping into 2009

Of course it wasn't all poverty and desperation in India. Our group managed a jolly day on December 25th with a lavish lunch, Indian-brewed champagne (which wasn't nearly as disgusting as it sounds) and Secret Santa presents.

But it was New Year's eve that claimed most attention and demanded much ingenuity. Compulsory Indian fancy-dress meant scouring the local markets for baubles, and a couple of hilarious visits to bemused merchants in Bijaipur village. The 'boys' of the group went collectively to the nearest tailor to be kitted out with pyjama suits and turbans but my own costume demands were such that I had to be diverted to a separate, female, seamstress who agreed to manufacture, overnight, not just a sari and choti but a pair of magnificent fake breasts, complete with triple-pinch-pleated nipples, so I could impersonate Mother India herself, Indira Gandhi.



Since no-one in Bijaipur has access to the internet, it was a feat of collective memory to re-create Indira's streaked hair-do and habitual plain sari - everything in Rajasthan is so darned colourful, white is considered almost obsolete! But with the help of the wonderful Maneka and her husband, the beauty and massage therapists, even the make-up was achieved more or less.



as you can see, Maharajah Narendra seemed delighted at his ghostly guest and took pride in introducing 'Mrs Gandhi' to everyone. He even asked her to dance, which was the moment at which it all went horribly wrong.

About two minutes into my one-woman Bhangra display, I felt the most terrible pain in my calf and thought first of all (I had had several cocktails at this point) that I'd been shot, possibly in some ghastly re-creation of Indira's own assassination. A fellow holidaymaker was a GP and helpfully pointed out that it was probably a torn gastrocnenius muscle and there was nothing to be done but hobble for the next four to six weeks whilst it sorted itself out.

Fortunate perhaps, because in that get-up it would have been a long night in A&E ...

I crawled, literally, the three flights to bed and spent a restless night, not least because the magnificent firework display planned for midnight was launched from the platform immediately above my bedroom - and despite craning my neck from every available window I couldn't actually see much of anything, just hear the third world war breaking out overhead.

The next morning I limped into an eerily quiet Bijaipur village - nothing to do with it being New Year's Day, but most of the shops and businesses were closed because of cow-rustling. Somewhere nearby, a (sacred) cow had been killed and men arrested for selling the meat. It was extraordinary to see the lowering impact this had on the population, an odd combination of collective shame, mourning and disgust. It also highlighted for me the strange situation in India where so many people are starving whilst meat walks amongst them unmolested, such is the power and conviction of the Hindu faith you can do nothing but marvel at it.

So, in the muted village, I managed to find an open pharmacy and to buy over the counter, oh the delight of not needing prescriptions for anything, some Diclofenac anti-inflammatory pain killers. Since the pharmacy dealt in both human and veterinary preparations, I'm not sure which I received and think they may either have been horse pills, or human suppositories, but I swallowed them like they were M&Ms.

Six weeks later, I'm on the mend. But I won't be Bhangra dancing for a while.

The White Man's Burden

Thanks to wholesale overbooking by British Airways, I got upgraded to first class on the way home from Delhi, and am in the seat of my dreams 1A at the very front of the plane where the windows curve to give you a view forwards. From this vantage point, I can - just - see the brown villages of India slipping beneath the fuselage.

And I'm in torment. Having spent most of the past two weeks in the small village of Bijaipur in Rajasthan, staying in whatever comfort it can manage as a paying guest of the local 'Rao' (I think it translates as 'King') in his ramshackle castle, I've had an opportunity to see, up close and personal, how more than four-fifths of the population of India survives in the 21st century. Which is to say literally scratching a living from the red dirt.

What point is there, then, to complain that the lobster tasted of fridge-chill and the Chablis had more oak than the average coffin, when 35,000 feet below people are starving. These are the kinds of counterpoints which have been exercising me since a few days into the holiday.

I've been to India before, in fact this was my sixth or seventh visit, and surprisingly little has changed since my first trip 25 years ago except perhaps my attitudes and the fact I now know to bring a hot-water bottle because the nights are so cold.

Castle Bijaipur has been in the family for pushing five hundred years, and the current Rao Saheb Narendra Singh is the feudal lord of the local manor. Except the title is not a mere honorific. When you see the local people run to bow to the ground and touch his clothes, you realise that to them he is landlord, employer, teacher, judge, father, and king. It's a bizarre anachronism.



And none of the feudal loyalty seems affected or fawning, it's transparent that the farmers, goat-boys, watchmen and keepers we encounter on our early morning birdwatching walks with Narendra genuinely adore and revere him. Although clearly an authority figure, he never patronises them in his demeanour or conversation. It's like a working version of the sixteenth century, and the inequality and injustice compete with the obvious munificence and working practicalities to tug confusingly at my liberal heart.

It's strange to be a tourist where tourists are so rare. In most of my forays to Asia, I've followed well-trodden paths and seen only a sanitised version of the country. Typically if you try to photograph a local they will shy away, or women pull a veil across their faces. Here, when our safari in rattling old Indian Army jeeps encounters a woman trudging home along a forest road with a bundle on her head and a baby on her hip, the Nikons and Canons are instantly levelled at her like a firing squad. Instead of retreating, she widens her smile and hitches the baby higher on her hip to oblige the photographers. No question of payment or small gift, this is friendly return of curiosity. It's uncanny.



Returning to Delhi is a nasty shock. The city seems hell-bent on Westernised destruction. Whilst the dignified Lutyens government buildings still flank Rajpath and have been remarkably preserved, the commercial areas are as frenetic as anything in Hong Kong or Singapore, rabid with retailers chasing the middle-class rupee. In its relentless pursuit of commercialism, with adverts for mobile phones, cars, scooters, sportswear, media and airlines on every hoarding and in every magazine, it appears that the Government of India, in cahoots with the multi-nationals, has decided that there are enough salaried Indians to sustain an urban middle-class consumer market, but that the rest of the population - say a billion of India's 1,200,000,000 headcount - can be safely ignored.

200 million people represents a market the size of any four major European countries, and presumably justifies the advertising spend of Nokia, Nike, Coca-Cola and Microsoft, but the consequences will be the continuing polarisation of India where the city-dwelling fifth of the population has its aspirational lifestyle built on air-conditioning, cellphone, laptop and MTV while the other four-fifths don't have clean water or sanitation.

These concerns were honed for me by reading Aravind Adiga's Booker prize-winner White Tiger which refers to the uncommercialised sector of Indian society as 'The Darkness' and seeing Danny Boyle's Oscar dead-cert 'Slumdog Millionaire' whose plot hinges on the unlikelihood of a tea-boy from the slums to have had any sort of education.

... to be continued

Canary Yellow

Canary Wharf 'nuclear' sunset, originally uploaded by blowstar.

Finally gave in and joined Flickr. Here's my first photo ... a 'nuclear' sunset over Canary Wharf taken at the local DLR station, Pontoon Dock.

Ghetto Blaster

Tricky one, this. Imagine you're a producer with a new show to launch on the brink of the worst recession for thirty years, amid plummeting audience figures, in an unpopular theatre, with a cast of mostly unknowns. About the Holocaust. And it's a backstage musical.

This in itself could be a comedy to put The Producers in the shade, but it says something about the central theme of indomitable spirit that has clearly infected the investors, production team and cast as "Imagine This" defies its assault by the broadsheet critics and cheap jibes at its soft target from bloggers (like myself) to limp bloodied but unbowed into its second month in the West End.

I met two of the American small-scale backers who had flown over for the premiere, seduced into contributing to the $10 million investment by a DVD of the less-than-stellar production in Plymouth. They had been told that the show would start to pay back after 26 weeks of sellout performances. Yeah, right, at a time when nothing less than David Tennant or Harry Potter in the nuddy can spontaneously erect a 'House Full' sign ...

Blind faith is another pervasive theme of the production.

In 1942, a bunch of actors are among the thousands corralled into the Warsaw ghetto and, with historical improbability straining at its stays, are encouraged by the Nazis to put on a musical pageant about the fall of Masada (in 73AD when the Romans laid siege to the Judaean mountaintop settlement and the Jews committed mass suicide rather than be captured). Each actor plays both a Warsaw Jew and a Masadist (?) or Roman, and the ludicrous dual romantic sub-plot involves a spunky Jewess falling for the local Nazi commander, and a Judaean firebrand being bedded by the Roman general.

The Roman general/Polish resistance fighter left me cold, being played by diminutive Australian Simon Gleeson whose speciality seemed to be spitting every line whilst keeping his carefully trimmed beard dry, but the stomping Nazis who stopped just short of homoerotic fantasy still pulled focus. Call me old fashioned, but in a musical you're naturally going to favour the tall blond leading men over the whiny and runtish kosher munchkins.

In the Warsaw scenes, there's just a whiff of promise that this plot might pick up where Cabaret left off. Yes, I know there are four years between Kristallnacht and the foundation of the Warsaw ghetto and Berlin isn't Poland, but historical continuity isn't this show's strongest point and I was referring to the variety of musical styles Cabaret manages to embrace, whereas Imagine This is mired exclusively in the minor key, plangent, Kletzmer wail that pervades so much 'Jewish Music'.

But unfortunately most of the hours are given over to the Masada thing, and therein lies the show's failure. One of the rules of 'backstage musical' going right back to 42nd Street is that the audience is interested more in the actors' personal dramas than the show they're supposedly performing. Go on, name any of the shows that Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney ever put on in that barn. Exactly.

The other argument for focusing on the Warsaw episodes is that the whole Nazi/victim thing has got previous form. From both Cabaret and Sound of Music we know that the good and tuneful get shat on by the Germans, and understand the stock characters of the sympathetic SS officer and the morally weak collaborator. Both here, natch, but not given the stage time to develop their characters beyond the superficial, because we're busy raising barricades and waving an awful lot of red banners (wonder where they got those ideas) so as not to let the Romans climb up the the mountain top and start to blow Gabriel blow. Sorry, touch of the 'Anything Goes' creeping in ...

I must be one of the few audience members (there were about 300 of us last night) who has been to both Masada and Auschwitz, and I can tell you that it's the Holocaust stuff that schticks in your memory, not some 1st Century Judaean Jonestown massacre, and therefore makes the better material for a musical.

My suspicion is that this production, which has a lot in common with Martin Guerre, will be called off for major revisions and come back re-branded and re-packaged (and hopefully re-cast with a couple of faces you could put on a poster) for a more successful run.

It should, because the production values are high, the lighting and staging are very effective - again, moreso on the Warsaw front with dramatic lighting changes and so much gunfire and crashing of metallic scenery that we could have been making the last act of Major Barbara in Undershaft's cannon foundry.

I liked some of the music: the anthemic title song, and one with something about clouds, but it's pretty monothematic and whilst the score contains some good Boublil-and-Schoenbergesque marching tunes, it needs better ballads and more variety. The introduction of the otherwise valuable actor Michael Matus (the 'village idiot' from Martin Guerre) as a camp slave is too "Up Pompeii" crude for the quality of the production, and this whole area needs a substantial re-write.

Lyrics universally need more work: this was the second musical in a week to rhyme 'virgin' with 'submerge in' and frankly Sondheim does it better ...

Peter Polycarpou works tremendously hard to hold the cast together, channelling David Kossoff , and mostly succeeds. I didn't enjoy Leila Benn Harris as a part-time Christine in Phantom, but she's on much safer ground here as the love interest of the freedom fighter, just needs to be given some better songs.

Incidentally, Masada was constructed by King Herod. Did you know his wife was called Doris? Now there's a Jewish momma waiting to be discovered in a musical ...

She IS big. It's the production that got small ...

There's something about Craig Revel Horwood I just don't like. It may be the introduction of confectionery into a surname that insults my diabetic sensibilities. Perhaps other theatre directors could consider the benefits of an injection of chocolate? Would Nicholas Malteser Hytner, or Trevor Minstrel Nunn be any more successful?

It may be the botoxed expressionless sneer he adopts for most of Strictly Come Dancing, or just an aversion to vertical hair, but I had to try hard not to let this prejudice colour my judgement of his production of Sunset Boulevard which has suddenly made the journey from Newbury to the Comedy Theatre in London's glittering West End with most of its cast intact.

What is has manifestly not done is tarted itself up for the trip to town. In fact, like a purposeful Berkshire housewife up for the Sales in sensible shoes, it looks like it's bought an Awayday ticket and is thinking of heading home on the late train.

This is a soundly competent regional production, from the Watermill - one of the most inventive and successful small producing theatres in Britain. Unlike anything you might see in Ipswich or Woking or Watford, it is not reliant on resting cast members of The Bill to attract audiences, nor is it a slave to Bill Kenwright and the Theatre of the Hasbeen.

The structure of the show is the brainchild not of C Revel H, but of the Watermill's resident artistic director John Doyle who pioneered, about ten years ago, the idea that actors in a musical could also play the instruments and dispense with a pit band thanks to the inventive musical arrangements of his creative partner Sarah Travis.

It's a formula which has worked brilliantly on productions from The Gondoliers, cunningly set in a Chicago pizza restaurant, to the outstanding Sweeney Todd which played first at the Trafalgar Studios before transferring to Broadway, giving Patti LuPone her second crack at Mrs Lovett, this time with a euphonium, and winning two Tonys.

At its best, the technique makes musicals more intimate, allowing emotional insight and subtleties of character to emerge from under the cellular blanket of lush orchestrations. I'm not sure if the formula's getting old, or there's some reason for it not to work on this particular oeuvre, but it doesn't.

Perhaps taking the immortal line about the pictures getting small, we should consider that the epic scale of Sunset demands grandiose staging and extravagant production values to match the melodramatic plot and the Churrigueresque characters? Certainly it needs more instruments to emulate that string-rich cinematic sound.

In the 60's, Stephen Sondheim had the idea of making a musical of Sunset Boulevard and collaborated briefly with lyricist Burt Shevelove to put it together, but then he met Billy Wilder at a cocktail party and floated the idea past him. "You can't write a musical about Sunset Boulevard," Wilder responded, "it has to be an opera. After all, it's about a dethroned queen." Sondheim ditched the project immediately.

Clearly, Andrew Lloyd-Webber didn't suffer the same agony of self-doubt.

I love the score. Apart from the fact that it's ironing music - a double CD to see you through the most demanding pile of shirts - and it dawned on me recently that there really only are four distinct tunes in the whole thing, I have loyally seen first Betty Buckley, then Patti, Petula and Glenn Close give their Normas. Shunned Paige, obviously. But this time, it's not working for me. Don't worry, Andrew, it happens to every composer your age at least once ...

Not that you can really fault the performances - Kathryn Evans gives her all in pursuit of the fractured heart and tortured soul of Norma Desmond and in some moments - notably her delusional return to Paramount with 'It's As If We Never Said Goodbye' she nails it absolutely.

It's Lloyd-Webber's fault that "With One Look" comes too early in the show to be effective. When she's in her light, and on her notes, this is thrilling stuff. But in this production she's too often clambering up or down a cranked metallic spiral staircase in heels and a succession of rhinestone peignoirs. Clearly she got the rump of the costume budget because everyone else seems to be in grey and white separates which might have been picked from Debenhams, since they owe little to period or place.



As Joe Gillis, relative newcomer Ben Goddard has to follow great performances like John Barrowman and Hugh Jackman, and whilst marginally less attractive, he has the ordinary guy 'aw shucks' likeability and the floppy haircut, but his range of expressions is perhaps equally floppy.

He does very well in some of the numbers, jolting the production out of its misty unreality with genuine fire in the duet "Too Much in Love to Care" played angrily against flame-haired Laura Pitt-Pulford as Betty Schaefer. In fact so convincing was the tempestuous love-hate argument between the angry young man and the redhead, it threatened to lapse in to Will and Grace: the Musical, highlighting the possibility that Kathryn Evans and Karen Walker could be cousins.

At least he affects an American accent. I have no idea why Evans elected to play Norma quite so cut-glass home counties.

Dave Willetts adds to the grand guignol mood of the drama with a dark characterisation for the servant/husband Max, and effortlessly excellent singing you'd expect from a veteran Jean Valjean and Phantom. The ensemble keep up their instrumental playing relentlessly, and play the entire score from memory, but it does cause some detraction from the diction and the impact of some of the punchier numbers like the rousing 'This Time Next Year' is lost.

I was expecting more from the choreography since that's Revel-Horwood's forte, allegedly. Apart from some nifty traffic-direction with the performers and their instruments moving rapidly without collision, there's little actual dancing - except when Joe and Norma perform the tango in a version so obviously more indebted to Strictly Come Dancing than thirties Hollywood, that you could feel the entire audience clenching to avoid shouting "bring back John Sergeant!"




Trivia:

Kathryn Evans is Mrs Peter Purves (of Blue Peter fame). They met in pantomime in 1978 when she was Dandini and he was Baron Hardup.