BWW Reviews: THE TIGER LILLIES: RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER, Queen Elizabeth Hall, September 5 2013

Reviewing is usually an easy gig. This happened, then that happened; he was good, she was even better; you'll enjoy it, the family will enjoy it - yadda, yadda, yadda.

Then comes something that is truly indescribable - and, if that's what the reviewer writes, then it's a bit of a cop-out, isn't it? So - dodging accusations of copping out, here goes with my attempt to describe the indescribable.

Martyn plays the accordion and the piano and sings; Adrian plays the bass and the saw and sings a bit too; Mike plays the drums, but doesn't sing much. Mark has made some pictures, moving ones too; and Begona and James have lit the whole thing. All of which is true - in the sense that the statement, "Romeo and Juliet is a play about a couple of overwrought teens wrapped up in gang culture" is true.

This production is the most beautiful I have seen. Mark Holthusen's animations fill the stage, front and back, top to bottom, with the first use of 3-D technology that actually adds something to the traditional flat projection. The American borrows something from anime, specifically Hayao Miyazaki's aesthetic in films like Spirited Away and My Neighbour Totoro, but his is a signature that is all his own. The band really do appear to be under the gorgeous turquoise sea, in a fiery, red-hot hell or mixing it quayside with the salts. In the very best sense of the phrase, you don't know where to look.

But you do know where to listen. Martyn Jacques' falsetto is undiminished in his mid-fifties, stunningly precise throughout the full ninety minutes. Quite how a three-piece band manage to make so much sound is beyond my ken - but it's the craft of the playing that brings the melancholic tone (piano and saw) and a riotous noise (accordion and bass) that pitches the tale back and forth, as if on the high seas itself. It's simply too easy to pigeonhole the Lillies as a cult band - their songs are as plaintive and as uplifting, as delicate and as brutal, as catchy and as moving as any band plays anywhere. On top of everything else, they're the best cabaret act I'll see this year.

So there you have it - or rather you don't. Because it's impossible to pin down this adaptation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's account of the cursed mariner in mere words - it's a sensual, searing spectacular. part Vegas, part Royal Opera House, part gypsy festival. You have to see, and hear, it to believe it.

The Tiger Lillies: Rime of the Ancient Mariner is at the Southbank Centre until 8 September.

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