ROMANTIC TREAT IS EVER SO SWEET
Romantics Anonymous (Bristol Old Vic Live Stream via TicketCo) Verdict: A tasty return ★★★✩✩ The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde (blackeyed theatre. ticketco.events) Verdict: Saucy split personality drama ★★★✩✩
REMEMBER when putting on a show seemed relatively straightforward?
Theatre director Emma Rice and her faithful company of actors, called Wise Children, have had Covid tests and isolated in a collective bubble in order to live- stream this cheerfully saccharine musical adaptation of the French film Les Emotifs Anonymes (first seen when Ms Rice ran Shakespeare’s Globe in 2017).
The upshot is that they can now hold hands and even kiss on stage — with Boris Johnson’s blessing.
Rice’s work can seem trapped in a nostalgic Neverland, and Romantics Anonymous — the story of a desperately shy chocolatier who meets the excruciatingly awkward owner of a failing chocolate factory — is no exception.
As a digital tour, sharing proceeds with cash- strapped theatres across the country and performed live at Bristol’s Old Vic, I wish it well.
But as my ten-year-old daughter warned: ‘Too much chocolate can make you feel a bit sick, Dad.’
To add insult to indigestion, painfully shy characters can make for painfully slow progress; and the gaucheness gag wears off well before the two hours are up.
As for the notion that the show is suitable for eight-year-olds, the mother yelling ‘Who gives a s***? P*** off!’ at her Y- fronted boyfriend put paid to that. Still, Carly Bawden lends our shy heroine Angelique a sweetly earnest face with a corresponding singing voice, and she flashes her pins athletically for her pas de deux.
As her clammy beloved JeanRené, Marc Antolin sings with a suitably squashed squawk, but for me his pain stays buttoned up inside his cardy. My favourite was Gareth Snook as the bobblehatted geek who can only muster nervous mumbles at the self-help group for the terminally bashful.
Some of Christopher Dimond’s lyrics are nicely sour, including the French waiters’ boast that ‘even our farts smell like fine pot pourri’. But other songs, charting ever tighter knots of social anxiety, get predictable.
Likewise, Michael Kooman’s endlessly benign music with plinky-plonk piano, rolling drum, tinkling triangle and wheezing accordion, gets a bit laboured.
Perhaps the most exciting thing about this is that it’s happening at all. The TicketCo app worked a treat on my TV; and you can log on from a phone or computer. So maybe it will trigger a whole new sub-genre of theatre online.
NICK LANE’S filmed stage adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s gothic masterpiece Jekyll & Hyde audaciously smuggles in a love story.
Our respectable Dr Jekyll, who meddles fatefully with his brain chemistry, has an affair with the Irish music hall actress married to his Victorian lab assistant. One can imagine Stevenson choking in his grave. At least there’s highquality acting. Blake Kubena in the title roles is reminiscent of a lavishly bewigged Patrick Stewart; while Paige Round is defiant as his forbidden love.