A bittersweet return for Michael Crawford
The Go-Between
Apollo
Michael Crawford is back in the West End in a major musical role for the first time in more than a decade (yes, he was in, and starred as, The Wizard of Oz at the Palladium five years ago but he didn’t, as here, “carry” the show.)
I wish I could say “rejoice”, hang out the bunting and convene a street party along Shaftesbury Avenue. But the actor who forced us to see him as much more than simpering silly-billy Frank Spencer in Some Mothers Do
Have ‘Em, not least through his career-remaking turn in the Eighties as the half-masked anti-hero of The Phantom
of the Opera, is a shadow of his former self in The Go-Between, a new-ish musical based on the evergreen 1953 LP Hartley novel.
At one level, that makes for perfect casting. The 74-year-old plays Leo Colston, a man haunted by memories of life-shaping, rites-of-passage events that took place half a century ago, in 1900, on a grand estate in Norfolk. He’s a desiccated creature, stuffy and tweedy, unattached and emotionally stunted from cleaving nobly to his earliest infatuation – Marian, older sister of his childhood friend Marcus, with whom he stayed that golden summer. The upper-class lass made him a secret “go-between”, ferrying letters between herself and her tenant-farmer lover, Ted, and poor Leo has been in psychological limbo ever since.
There’s no getting round the awkward fact, though, that Crawford’s best days as a stage actor are now behind him. The shuffling stiffness, the grey hair, the blinking sad-eyed stare through spectacles – all that strikes the right melancholy chords. The contrast between advancing infirmity and supple youth, between rueful experience and wide-eyed innocence, comes across forcefully, as Crawford stalks – and gazes after – his younger self (beautifully played and sung, on the night I attended, by William Thompson, one of three rotated juvenile co-leads). But that voice is rather too rasping and, while Crawford can sustain the odd note, it’s as if he totters under the weight of the tunes.
The evening finally gathers to a stirring head as the story builds to its riveting, melodramatic climax of discovery and tear-jerking desolation: the child recriminates with the adult he became, and Richard Taylor and David Wood’s adroit adaptation (which sometimes owes as much to Sondheim as it does to Hartley) fully earns its artistic keep.
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” as that famous opening line (only half-quoted in this version) has it; and I’m struggling to reconcile the ardent affection I felt for this show when it premiered in Leeds five years ago with the scepticism I’m seized by now. Aside from Crawford, I think it’s a mistake to have retained a bare-bones chamber aesthetic, however imposing as the set design, with large back doors and suggested side windows is. The only instrument is a grand piano, at which Nigel Lilley heroically thunders away, like an over-worked secretary forced to touch-type the entire novel.
Among the slightly indistinguishable, period-dressed ensemble, it’s small wonder that the chest-baring Stuart Ward stands out as the taciturn local he-man Ted, though it’s impossible to miss the Phantomesque presence of Stephen Carlisle as Marian’s unwanted intended Trimingham, facially scarred by the Boer War. Gemma Sutton plays Marian, whose mask of good nature begins dropping as she becomes more coercive and desperate. The fact that she seems relatively ordinary to us but is so remarkable to little Leo slips to the heart of the story’s quiet profundity. Worth a look, then, but not queuing round the block to see.
Until Oct 15. Tickets: 0330 333 4809; thegobetweenmusical.com