Olé! Terrific Tamsin’s a Spanish firecracker
Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown (Playhouse Theatre)
Verdict: These mad women are magnifico!
NOW here was a dangerous assignment. They stage a musical version of a cheeky Spanish story which depicts women as drug-taking, guntoting neurotics. And they send a tweedy, male, English harrumpher to review it. One stepped into the Playhouse Theatre for Monday’s Press Night as a goat entering a minefield.
We even had Cherie Blair in the firstnight stalls!
Actually, this inventive new version of Pedro Almodovar’s 1988 classic film is a stylish hoot — a fiesta of PMT with monstrous, ticklish caricatures and, ultimately, a heart very much in the right place.
Tamsin Greig, most British of comic performers, plays Pepa, a Madrid actress who has just been dumped — via the answering machine — by married boyfriend Ivan (Jerome Pradon). Ivan is not exactly a looker but he somehow attracts feisty women.
His bonkers wife Lucia (Haydn Gwynne, a comic revelation) is still in love with him. There is another senora up his sleeve, too.
Hang on, what’s that sound? Has someone connected a sealion to a microphone? No, it’s Miss Greig singing. This is her first stab at musical theatre and it is an odd voice: clear, quite deep, at times comparable to a clarinet, though not always in time with the excellent band pumping out jazzy latin numbers.
Does it matter that the star of the show is no Elaine Paige? Not really. Miss Greig’s character is so likeable, it only endears her to us more.
ON RATTLES the plot: Ivan’s outwardly conventional son (Haydn Oakley, a bout as Spanish as HP Sauce) and his virginal fiancee (Seline Hizli) end up at Pepa’s house.
So does Pepa’s zany friend Candela (Anna Skellern), a model who is having an affair with an Uzi-armed terrorist. Oops. Is that OK after Paris last week?
Miss Skellern stamps her mark on this show, not least in a song called Model Behaviour when she has numerous high- speed entrances and has to deliver quick-fire words amid a welter of choreography and music.
Terrific stuff. Her dreamily sexy character, finding herself in legal difficulties, is asked ‘do you have a lawyer?’
She replies: ‘I did, but he went back to his wife.’
Miss Gwynne’s wife character, meanwhile, looks at a Picasso print. She mistakenly thinks she is looking at a mirror.
‘My God,’ she shudders, beholding the Picasso face with its wonky nose and ears and eyes, ‘I look dreadful.’
David Yazbek’s music and lyrics, when not whacking out the Spanish rhythms (guitarist Ricardo Afonso doubles as a troubadour and an amusing taxi driver), find a lovely balance of breezy romance.
Quieter songs such as Mother’s Day and Island go some way to calming the whole thing down and giving it a gentle side; not that it ever becomes entirely sentimental.
Anthony Ward’s other-worldly set is lit with surreal candy colours. The first half ends not quite with a cliff-hanger but with a balcony-hanger. Maybe the pace lagged a little in the early scenes at opening night. Tamsin Greig’s brilliant public persona, ineffably sardonic with that nasal voice and insistent gazelle f ace, may outwardly be all wrong for a comedy set in post-Franco Madrid.
And not much effort is made to give the characters a Spanish feel — one line runs ‘I don’t have a bloody clue’ — and this is perhaps a missed trick. Yet Miss Greig’s stage presence proves irresistible.
As for the gross gender stereotypes, this show may irk the more mirthless egalitarians, but in the end it becomes a cheerful, life-affirming lament about sisterly solidarity in the face of rotten, beastly men.
Magnifico!