Hallelujah! It’s Saint Bob and the Live Aid messiahs
Just For One Day (Old Vic, London) Verdict: A religious experience ★★★★✩ Dear Octopus (Lyttelton, National Theatre, London) Verdict: cosy blur ★★★✩✩
AFEW questions ahead of the Live Aid musical Just For One Day at London’s Old Vic. Have you been saved? Be honest now… Are you ready for the Biblical tide that is about to engulf you? For, truly, this is no ordinary commemoration of an event 40 years ago. It is a borderline Pentecostal church service, based on testimonies of those who ‘were there’, and singing hymns to ‘ Saint’ Bob Geldof himself.
If you still feel the spirit stir, step into Waterloo’s ersatz River Jordan to be baptised with pop platitudes, as we are asked at the outset: ‘What does it take to make the world listen?’
The short answer is: ‘Music!’
The long answer is the play itself — starting with the 1984 Band Aid Christmas record, followed by the Wembley gig of July 1985.
Unlike that event, which encompassed David Bowie and George Michael (among other rock messiahs), on a path prepared for them by Bob ‘The Baptist’ Geldof, this is a star-free homage.
Its most remarkable quality is Matthew Brind’s musical arrangements, which ensure overfamiliar chart hits are reborn.
And it climaxes with All You Need Is Love and a risibly prayerful rendition of Let It Be (even my 14-year-old daughter snorted with mirth).
The miracle of what Sir Bob achieved, though, in raising millions for famine-stricken Ethiopia is not to be underestimated. As Geldof, Craige Els is a pleasingly irritable uncle with the rings of Saturn around his eyes. He never tires of the f-word (though we do), but he also has the best line in John O’Farrell’s script: ‘I’m not lying. I’m just saying something that might be true later.’
My favourite character is nonetheless Julie Atherton’s Mrs Thatcher. She’s exactly the grinch this show needs — withholding the 15 per cent VAT levied on Live Aid’s fundraising, and bossily performing The Pretenders’ song Stop Your Sobbing with a hip-hop shuffle in her tweed skirt.
Yes, there are times when they’re overcome by missionary zeal — and we, the audience, may feel the need for a quick shot of Pepto Bismol.
But that doesn’t stop Just For One Day absolutely nuking, erasing and laying waste to all cynicism — to ensure Saint Bob and crew rise again.
n DEAR Octopus is about the inescapable tentacles of family life. It’s a 1938 drama by 101 Dalmatians author Dodie Smith, set in a family gathering for a 50th wedding anniversary — against the background of an impending WWII. And it’s an audaciously bland piece of work that should perhaps carry the trigger warning ‘May Induce Sleep’.
Weirdly, though, that doesn’t mean it’s no good. We are obliged, instead, to tune into a genial comedy that underpins a middle-class get-together led by Lindsay Duncan as mother hen Dora.
Yet if you stick with it, there is subterfuge amid mild rumination on the brevity and ennui of life, as well as arguments about ownership of hot water bottles.
Danger lurks beyond the walls, too, not only because of wireless updates on preparations for war, but because, as one character chillingly remarks, ‘you see nature in the raw at the golf club’.
Duncan’s warmly imperious grandma has antennae for everyone’s emotional state. In particular, her estranged daughter Cynthia ( Bethan Cullinane), her amusingly OCD daughter Hilda (Jo Herbert), and her married daughter Edna (Pandora Colin).
I soon realised the men in Smith’s play are as superfluous on stage as they are in the audience.
Malcolm Sinclair as grandad feels he deserves a statue for his services to DIY, but fails to notice he’s a statue already.
Billy Howle makes light work of the son Nicholas, who’s implausibly obtuse in his treatment of maid Fenny (Bessie Carter).
Rising star Emily Burns directs a fluid and flawlessly placid spectacle, in which period set and costumes blend into a cosy, designer blur of eau de Nil.