Chilling highs and a touch of Les Mis
Given the phenomenal worldwide success of Les Misérables, it’s surprising how few of Victor Hugo’s novels have been cannibalised and turned into musicals. Aside from Disney’s relatively recent screen-tostage version of The Hunchback of
Notre Dame, which didn’t really go places, there hasn’t been much. Now, though, as part of Bristol Old Vic’s 250th anniversary season, comes a very free adaptation of L’Homme qui rit (1869), a work written by Hugo while he was living in exile on the Channel Islands.
A ghoulish tale of a man whose mouth was carved into a permanent smile as a child, it has been adapted before, mostly for the screen: a 1928 silent version was credited with inspiring The Joker in Batman, while Gérard Depardieu starred in a 2012 French adaptation as Ursus, the mountebank who has turned the grinning Gwynplaine into a freak sideshow attraction to keep them in body and soul. The Old Vic’s account has been five years in development and has had £370,000 poured into it. The hope for the show, directed by Tom Morris, a driving force behind
War Horse, must be that they are on to a winner. I wish I could cheer The Grinning
Man straight into the West End, but my response is the critical equivalent of a natural smile-for-camera that turns into a pained grimace. At its best, it displays a blackly comic brilliance and inventive daring that’s a joy to behold; at its worst, it feels like rambling, convoluted storytelling that craves parental levels of indulgence, like Tim Burton on an off-day. At almost three hours, it starts to flag.
Adaptor Carl Grose has shifted the action from the original setting of Queen Anne-era England and relocated it to a more period-fluid and fictionalised Bristol – the whole thing exquisitely rendered by designer Jon Bausor, converting the proscenium arch itself into a bloodied rictus grin. Our host for the evening is the cadaverous clown-figure of Barkilphedro, miserable resident goon at the court of King Clarence. He’s played with creeping, leering, frighten-the-kiddies aplomb by Julian Bleach (a tour de force to match his treasured turn in the runaway hit “junk opera”, Shockheaded Peter).
With tattered ruff and tipsy bearing, Barkilphedro introduces us to Clarence’s three children – one of whom will become the sour-faced queen, the other two, Lord David and Duchess Josiana, will become enchanted by the scar-faced hero, now renamed Grinpayne. How this benighted youth (Louis Maskell, sporting an ear-to-ear bloodied bandage for much of the time) came to suffer his disfigurement is told in flashback form in the circus show within the show, using a boy puppet and shadow play. But is that version of events reliable? Grinpayne’s suffering is alleviated by a special potion that fogs his memory. We gradually discover more about Ursus, the pretty blind girl he’s also got in tow (Audrey Brisson’s Dea), and Barkilphedro’s sinister hand in everything.
The heart of this “cracked fairy tale” has pertinent points to make about psychological as well as physical abuse, the restrictive stories children are told about themselves, but the knotty plotting can leave you more bothered than bewitched.
Musically, though, the piece (composed by Tim Phillips and Marc Teitler, performed live) shows tremendous promise. At times it hits chilling highs reminiscent of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, at other points resembling more conventional musical fare, even getting a touch
Les Mis- like. The cruelty and macabre wit needs more continuity, but that sweet-sour contradiction just about works. With some sharp trimming, the whole thing could fly. And any show that closes its first half with a maniacal choral number (celebrating the anti-hero’s bizarre newfound messianic appeal) called A Scar Is Born has got to be worth a look.
‘Musically, the piece shows tremendous promise, at times reminiscent of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd’