You’ll love getting to know this ravishing KING
The King And I (Dominion Theatre, London) Verdict: Crowning glory ★★★★☆
Till The Stars Come Down (Dorfman, National Theatre)
Verdict: Stellar new show ★★★★☆
Othello (Shakespeare’s Globe) Verdict: From Bard to worse
ONE of the joys of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s gorgeously-bloated musical, The King And I, is that it’s a sort of multi- cultural mega-mix.
Happily, New York’s Lincoln Center hit production, which toured the UK last year starring Helen George from Call The Midwife, is still winning hearts in the West End as it stops off for a last hurrah.
George plays the intrepid Victorian traveller Anna Leonowens, who became a governess and teacher at the court of the King of Siam in the 1860s. While she was at it, she taught a lesson in feminism to a king who saw himself as a scientific cultural progressive — despite fathering 82 children by 32 wives.
But the remarkable thing about this production is that Darren Lee turns the absolute monarch into an excitable reformer with a great sense of fun. But fear not: his king still has a short fuse, believes in flogging his subjects, and sees no contradiction between his polygamy and his concubines’ enforced monogamy.
George’s Anna is a simpler fusion of Julie Andrews and Margaret Thatcher. She sings fruitily-and forcefully, but reminds the king that her huge, upside-down cupcake of a dress is a symbolic defence against men — a sort of mobile personal security compound, you might say.
Elsewhere, Cezarah Bonner’s Lady Thiang, the king’s principal wife, is an amusingly retro advocate for female subordination, singing ‘a man who needs your love can be wonderful’.
Marienella Philips’s Tuptim, on the other hand, strikes a blow for sexual liberation in her duet with her hunky lover Lun Tha (Dean John-Wilson), the ravishing We Kiss In A Shadow.
Bartlett Sher’s production, featuring legions of kids and lashings of costumes, purrs like a Rolls-Royce.
But the crowning glory is the mesmerising classical Thai dancing and acrobatics that make up the play within the play-that allows Tuptim to hold the king to account.
With much-loved earworms like Getting To Know You and Shall We Dance, Richard Rodgers’ sumptuous score is a cultural melange of its own, mixing the sounds of the orient with western classical music.
And I’ll always love Hammerstein’s tongue-in-cheek book and lyrics, which ensure the show is so delightfully prim and old-fashioned that it becomes, in the end, positively camp.
■ BETH STEEL’S new play Till The Stars Come Down is a piece of working-class Chekhov. A Nottinghamshire Three Sisters, to be precise; only instead of all that Russian hand-wringing, it’s set around a raucous family wedding.
The sisters are Sylvia (Sinead Matthews, right), who’s marrying a Polish immigrant; Maggie (Lisa McGrillis), whose chequered love life has seen her leave town; and Hazel (Lucy Black), clinging to a marriage that’s in the doldrums.
The joy of Steel’s writing is that it fizzes with four-letter vitality and pings with wit. ‘I’m so excited I’m peeing glitter!’ exclaims Maggie of Sylvia’s wedding.
And yet, though gleefully bawdy (including a kneetrembler grabbed by the newlyweds at the venue), it’s also rooted in memories of the miners’ strike and post-industrial decline. As Alan Williams’s doleful Tony remarks: ‘It’s all gone, everything that was, we’re all that’s left of it.’
Steel’s only problem is how to end it while giving everyone in the cast of ten a turn.
Nor would you want her to thwart a fabulously disreputable Aunty Carol ( Lorraine Ashbourne), or whiskery Williams, who brings down the house with a Tarzan impersonation.
So even if Steel leaves it all hanging, it’s still one helluva bittersweet ride.
■ BACK in 2018, Shakespeare’s Globe ditched Emma Rice as Artistic Director because of her failure to comply with the Bard’s ‘original practices’. Electric lighting and amplified music were deemed a nono. But what is the point of such purism if you make a travesty of the plays themselves, in the manner of Ola Ince in the theatre’s latest misadventure?
Her three-hour production of Othello is a masterclass in ineptitude. It turns Shakespeare’s black Venetian General into a Met Police ‘ Guvnor’ driven to murderous domestic violence byhis misogynistic buddy, ‘ DS’ Iago (Ralph Davis).
Poppy Gilbert, as Othello’s famously faithful wife Desdemona, is now called ‘Dezzie’, and the main action is relocated to London’s Docklands — after Othello and team emerge through a manhole in the sewers. Was the Tube on strike again?
Racial slurs are relayed over walkie-talkies, to rub in institutional racism.
Yet Ince’s most excruciating innovation is appointing a mime artist to writhe around Othello and illustrate his inner turmoil. I felt sorry for Ken Nwosu: a gentle and authoritative Othello, whose work is systematically annulled by Ince’s gimmicks.
She even goes so far as to rob him of his suicide in atonement for killing his wife – and has him tasered instead.
‘This would not be believed in Scotland Yard,’ laments one of the characters. No, nor anywhere else either, mate.