Adrian Mole musical will put a smile on your face
Hooray for Mole! Two years ago, I adored this funny, nuanced and surprisingly moving musical treatment of Sue Townsend’s much-loved 1982 novel when it premiered in Leicester, where it is set. Trimmed, tweaked and improved, it’s now providing a glorious summerholiday treat at the Menier Chocolate Factory.
In an ideal world, it would be scooped up and put in a small West End playhouse. Its hard-toiling originators Jake Brunger and Pippa Cleary (book, music and lyrics) deserve recompense. I fear, though, that this may be your only chance to catch it: risk-averse producers will point to the lack of star-names, ferocious competition from bigger “family” shows and may fret, too, that the Adrian Mole phenomenon relies on a grasp of the early Eighties that’s beyond children today.
What’s striking, though, watching Luke Sheppard’s ebullient yet compact staging, is how the piece is absolutely of its time but also stands its ground in the here and now. Set across 1981, it takes in the politics of the period and devotes a cheeky number to the Royal Wedding. Posters and playthings along the walls of Tom Rogers’s ingenious domestic interior reference Star Wars, Look-in magazine, Garfield, et al.
Yet much of this remains in popular culture. We’re still talking about Charles and Di; Mrs T, too. Plus, the emotional crux of the storyline, setting the blushing anxieties of adolescence against the upsets of adultery and marital break-up – itself motored by argybargy about unreconstructed gender divisions – well, those life challenges persist in the age of Snapchat. Do today’s Moles still scribble awful poems and send them to the BBC? Maybe not, but did they ever? Townsend, who died in 2014, indulged in a spot of poetic licence.
It’s immensely relatable, in other words; and the principals don’t just inhabit the characters, they embody youth on the cusp of change. Tightly drilled performances – no cue missed, no gag dropped – work in tandem with heart-skipping spontaneity so that we’re spared stage-school “showiness”.
Watching brilliant 14-year-old Benjamin Lewis (one of three Moles) at the opening matinee, blinking through super-square spectacles, the freshness of Townsend’s creation hit me anew. Everything seems to be happening to this weedy, would-be “intellectual” kid for the first time, from contending with bully-boy Barry (Connor Davies) and making precocious pronouncements of age-limited perspicacity (“Just my luck to have an assertive mother”) to trembling with desire for posh, proto-feminist Pandora (Asha Banks, 13, the perfect mix of poise, aloofness and vitality).
You can complain that some of the lyrics are pat to the point of trite (even if knowingly so; “Pandora/ I adore-ya” is a running joke). And though the professional cast, including John Hopkins as the lecherous Mr Lucas, are first-rate, I wasn’t always persuaded that having older actors making up the numbers as the children worked. The piece, with a prolonged nativity spoof, runs a little out of puff at the end, too.
But the ballads – between estranged husband and wife (Kelly Price and Dean Chisnall, terrific as Mr and Mrs M), and between mother and son – may bring a tear to your eye. And the piece’s upbeat spirit is an infectious joy.
It’s a show for all ages – particularly all 13¾-year-olds.
It takes in the politics of the period and references Star Wars, Garfield, et al. Yet much of this remains in popular culture