BWW Reviews: Reflections On 100 Reviews

One year out from London's showcase event of the century, the city is convulsed in the kind of riots that visit all cities from time to time and needs of a bit of TLC. Reflecting on one hundred reviews (from Pinocchio to Betwixt) reveals that London's extraordinary theatre is weathering the global recession through the old-fashioned approach of giving the public a fantastic offer at keen prices. I reflect below on the highlights, and one or two lowlights, of those evenings spent, wide-eyed, in the stalls.

"Why is everything I see with you better than everything I see on the telly?" So said my 14 year-old son, provoking me to consider why that should be the case - for it most certainly is. With so much entertainment mediated through glass - television screens, computer screens, big screens at concerts and sports grounds - the immediacy, the visceral nature of emotions on display, the sheer physicality of theatre, heightens the sensory appreciation and washes away any sense of the manufactured, melodramatic banality so common in other media (contrast Ophelia being led away to her death in the National Theatre's Hamlet with the ersatz drama of a reality TV show's elimination of the week).

This physical quality of theatre was at its most intense in two formats that I never thought I would appreciate or even understand - dance and opera. Matthew Bourne's Dorian, his interpretation of Wilde's tale of the cost of unbridled hedonism, was brought bang up to date and danced by graceful, but heavy, sweating, powerful men and women, a million miles from toe-standing in tights and tutus. Though one could appreciate the balance, the skill and precision of the cast, the story, now shorn of Wilde's words and wit, was stripped bare, becoming a parable for our times, a message from the century before last about the evils of excess apparent all around us in recession-hit Britain.

As physical, as intense and as unexpected was Madame Butterfly (or Bangkok Butterfly) at London's Little Opera House. Having seen Miss Saigon in the West End years ago and hated its manipulative showiness, I expected nothing, but was soon blown away (almost literally) by the force of opera singers performing a matter of feet away, voices booming, eyes blazing, hearts breaking. OperaUpClose delivered fully on their promise to bring their chosen form to new audiences in accessible formats that compromise nothing on the source material - I was hooked.

Time for a few - and they were few - turkeys. I don't get Terry Pratchett, so I didn't really get Nation at The National Theatre - taste still matters even with production values as high as those found on the South Bank. Conjugal Rites felt like a twenty year-old bad TV sitcom inexplicably revived in 2011 - no surprise really, as that is pretty much what it was. The Hobbit also suffered from being too true to what is says on the tin - there's perhaps only a certain kind of person who relishes two hours in the company of dwarves, hobbits and wizards furiously questing (though I wouldn't have missed the Woodsmen's dance routine for all the gold in the mines of Moria).

Children's theatre continues to challenge and entertain in equal measure and, as is the case for almost all the shows I reviewed, offers tremendous value, particularly when you factor in London's free bus travel for under-16s (and the fact that the kids can't eat popcorn non-stop sold at a prIce That would water the eyes of a crack dealer). The Unicorn Theatre is dedicated to producing work directed at children, but I have enjoyed their shows every bit as much as my kids. Despite many superb offerings from the outgoing ensemble (who signed off with a spectacular Three Musketeers), the pick of this theatre's work was My Mother Told Me Not To Stare, a fusion of opera, fantasy and drama that transfixed kids and parents alike and for which I would have happily paid for a seat the next evening in an attempt to unravel its complexity.

Where some productions aim squarely at a theatre-going intelligentsia (The Power of Yes at the National for example) and some aim right between the eyes of the mass-market, celebrity-driven middlebrow (Bill Kenwright's Scrooge), there's plenty of great entertainment to be had on "ITV primetime" to "BBC Four" spectrum. The Rocky Horror Show at the New Wimbledon Theatre was part panto, part nostalgia trip and wholly fun from start to finish; Romeo and Juliet at the Unicorn sacrificed nothing in being aimed at a teenage audience; and Salad Days at the Riverside Sudios was wonderful, anachronistic, escapist silliness played straight and all the funnier for it.

There's more, much more that I could highlight, but I fear your attention understandably wandering, so, before I come to my top three of the 100, I crave indulgence to spotlight three moments of theatrical magic. In the multi-media avant-garde The Colour of Nonsense, out of nowhere comes a reading of "The Dong with the Luminous Nose" accompanied by back-projections of Edward Lear's line drawings that, in less than a minute, convinced me of Lear's genius. In The Harder They Come, a retelling of the film on stage, a member of the chorus stepped forward to sing Many Rivers To Cross, moving some of the audience to tears. Chris Dugdale, a close-up conjuror, did things I didn't think possible and I still don't think possible now, even though I saw them done just a few feet in front of me. Only in theatre could those incidents (and many more I could highlight) bring such magic to the public.

To the podium - I'm just awarding medals, as I can't decide between gold, silver and bronze. London Road (pictured above) at the National is beautiful, frightening and unique. It takes the most hideous aspects of human nature and, through theatre, transforms them into a life-affirming statement of all that is good in ordinary people, as they deal with extraordinary events. The White Guard, also at the National, was an examination of a family caught up in war and power politics by a writer of genius (Mikhail Bulgakov) choked off by the ultimate victor of that war, but whose art lives long after Stalin's ideology has withered. The Coronation of Poppea takes one of the first operas ever written and brings it right up to date, with lovely swing arrangements and supercharged singing and acting, all done in the back room of a pub, this close - really, this close!

London Theatre - does any city come close to this breadth, this quality, this pleasure in an art form that continues to surprise, to provoke and to entertain? Enjoy it while we still can.

 

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