THEATRE Triumphs of surgery
Road Show MENIER CHOCOLATE FACTORY, LONDON
Emperor and Galilean NATIONAL THEATRE, LONDON
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o long as a novel finds a publisher, it is a finished text, but the complication of
drama is that a script is merely a blueprint for a physical performance. Much of the pain and expense of theatre lies in getting from paper to stage. In New York, a musical based on Spiderman has just become notorious for requiring a record 138 performances before opening night. And currently in London are two productions that emerged from very dif- ferent cultures – late-nineteenth-century Scandinavia and twenty-first-century Broadway – but which faced long and complex struggles to be realised as theatre. Stephen Sondheim’s musical Road Showhas gone through 11 years of work and four differ- ently titled versions to reach the form in which it has just received a UK premiere at the Menier Chocolate Factory. All the incarnations have told the story of Wilson and Addison Mizner, turn-of-the-twentieth- century American brothers who became involved in a variety of entrepreneurial schemes, but the show – previously staged in the US and/or recorded under the names Wise Guys, Gold and Bounce – has at different times been an epic, large- cast, multi-set piece (the first director was Hal Prince, associated with theatrical spec- taculars) and a chamber musical. Having now heard all four versions (it being a measure of Sondheim’s status that even his flops can be sold on CD), it’s clear what the problems always were. Because the Mizners operated across both America and the world and became involved in many get-rich-quick schemes (gold-digging, real estate, architec- ture, invention, theatrical production), the structure is necessarily episodic, which dis- sipates tension. It’s true that Sondheim has previously written a musical with no single protagonist – Assassins – but, in that case, the many scenes were thematically linked by the fact that every character had attempted to kill an American president. As its title suggests, this fourth version of the story attempts to make a virtue of the formlessness by emphasising the switches of setting. Road Showhas been turned by direc- tor John Doyle – who had great success with pared-down stagings of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd and Company – into a short, taut, 95- minute narrative, played without an interval, with all the performers on stage throughout, grouped around a large bed in which char- acters are born, die and unite romantically. Throughout the action, the singers shower
fake 100-dollar bills over stage and audience so that, by the end, it looks as if a bomb has gone off at the Bank of America. This device seems to be trying to give the show a unifying
26 | THE TABLET | 16 July 2011
But the decade or so that Road Show took to reach the stage seems lightning alongside the 138-year delay between the writing and the British premiere of Henrik Ibsen’s Emperor and Galilean. This epic history play –about the pagan apostasy of the Emperor Julian, who promoted a new faith based in sun worship as an alternative to Christianity in third-century Constantinople – would run for at least eight hours if fully staged, but in fair- ness was never intended to be, coming from a fashion in Norwegian literature for so-called “closet plays”, written to be read alone in a study rather than performed. For the play’s British premiere, the
Road Show: stops short of its intended artistic destination
scheme: the history of American capitalist greed and its frequent thwarting by the fragility of economies.
Given the long problems of the material, Doyle has achieved in play-doctoring the equivalent of what Christiaan Barnard man- aged in medicine and the evening is consistently enjoyable, with strongly sung and acted turns by Michael Jibson and David Bedella as the brothers. But Road Show still seems to stop short of its intended artistic destination. The major problem is that whereas Sondheim at his best writes songs that express daring and unexpected senti- ments – as when, in A Little Night Music, a love-troubled woman sings the beautiful and unusual “Send in the Clowns” – the numbers in this project express routine feelings about clichéd situations: Californian gold-diggers sing “Get rich quick!”, lovers assert that the object of affection is “the best thing that ever happened to me”.
RADIO Staying power
100 Years of Mervyn Peake BBC RADIO 4
ost Radio 4 literary commemoratives these days seem to be about lost causes: wistful reminiscences of J.B. Priestley; rueful encomia to Hugh Walpole; hands wrung above a succession of remainder bins. By con- trast, Sebastian Peake’s heartfelt tribute to the genius of his father (7 July) positively basked in the shadow of a well-burnished reputation. Shares in Peake have kept up since his death in 1968, and the consensus of last week’s centenary tributes was that here amid the echoing staircases prowled by Steerpike and Titus Groan lurked one of the most ver-
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director, Jonathan Kent, and the play- wright, Ben Power, have carved out a three-and-a-half-hour narrative, con- sisting of 15 scenes that move between Constantinople and places where Julian fought or thought, including Athens, Ephesus, Antioch and the battlefields of Persia. The result of this is a remarkably pacy and gripping drama – at the interval, I was startled to find that almost two hours had passed – which is also impressively clear on the theo- logical and ideological debates that made the subject interesting to Ibsen: whether Christianity can be reconciled with the pursuit of power or personal ambition with national advancement. And – as in the Donmar’s Luise Miller, reviewed here last week – the deep religious faith of some characters is respectfully presented as a historical fact, rather than mocked as an anachronism, as might have been the case a few years ago. With Ian McDiarmid outstanding as
Maximus, the strange sage on whom Julian depends, this is an unexpectedly thrilling addition to our knowledge of Ibsen and of ecclesiastical history. Both Road Show and Emperor and Galilean are victories over intractable material but the latter is the greater triumph. Mark Lawson
satile writer-illustrators of twentieth-century century Eng. Lit. Most of the paths explored in this absorbing half-hour led back to the Channel island of Sark, where Peake spent several formative years in the early 1930s, and then returned with wife and family in 1946. There was talk of its “isolation from the world”, of physical and emotional demarcations that might have been reflected in his work. In fact, quite as much stimulus might have been offered by his childhood in China. Here, as the son of a missionary doctor, Peake was brought up in a landscape where, as he put it, “God was at large and the great missionaries loomed like mammoths”. The 21-year-old art student who arrived on Sark in 1932 was by all accounts a Bohemian type, long-haired, ear-ringed and with a fond- ness for flowing capes. His grotesque representations of local fishermen were not always appreciated by the subjects: one of
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