A dour way to deal with a scandalous subject
Aldwych, London WC2
EVEN IF you are willing to accept without question the version of the Profumo scandal offered by Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new musical — and I am — you would hope that a show whose aim is to highlight one the establishment’s cruellest prosecutions since Oscar Wilde would at least leave you angry.
Yet Richard Eyre’s dour production inspires little more than passing regret for the events that led to Ward’s wax effigy standing in Blackpool’s Chamber of Horrors. It’s here, alongside mass murderers and sadists, that the musical kicks off when Alexander Han- son’s charming Ward comes to life.
But the show never really escapes the gloom of that place. Rob Howell’s design consists mainly of dark concentric curtains which, when drawn back, reveal the show’s various lively locations. There’s Murray’s Cabaret Club in Soho, whose regulars included slum landlord Peter Rachman and the Krays, and where Ward met party girls Christine Keeler and later Mandy Rice-Davis; the Berkshire cottage in Cliveden where Ward spent weekends partying, and Bill Astor’s nearby pile where Keeler first encountered Macmillan’s Minister of War Jack Profumo, the meeting which prompted the scandal. All of these places appear as projections on curtains the colour of silt. And the dulling effect is like looking at a show through a veil.
In Lloyd Webber’s previous show, the Phantom sequel Love Never Dies, the buckets of emoting generated by serial “show stoppers” not only failed to stop the show but were sung by protagonists as rounded as a cardboard cut-out. This time, at least, the score reflects the emotional life and depth of the characters while the best of the lyrics by Don Black and book writer Christopher Hampton are those that break free of the job of storytelling. Macmillan’s “never had it so good” is twisted into a mantra sung at one of Ward’s decadent sex parties — “you’ve never had it so often”. And Ward’s confession that he “thought heaven could be found this side of sky” elicits some genuine sympathy.
But the life of the show rests heavily on the presence of Charlotte Spencer’s Keeler and Charlotte Blackledge’s Rice-Davis. The major injustice here may have been on the scapegoated Ward, disgracefully persecuted by the government for the embarrassment caused by Profumo’s indiscretions. But the show I ended up wanting to watch was not about Ward, but about the women for whom powerful men risked and lost reputations.
Lyttelton, London SE1
A PROVINCIAL bank clerk impetuously ditches his staid life after misinterpreting the actions of a beautiful Italian lady who wishes to make a withdrawal. He stuffs his pockets with 60 thousand marks and absconds to the lady’s hotel. Unsurprisingly she’s not persuaded to go on the run with him. After that, he’s on his own.
These simple events in Georg Kaiser’s 1912 play could serve as the backbone for most works whose purpose is to shake their public into consider- ing life’s possibilities beyond the daily rhythms of work and family. But Kaiser’s scenes were also intended to serve the Expressionistic modes of German theatre — and here Melly Still grabs the licence the form gives her with mesmerising invention.
The plot evolves over 24 hours and Still and her designer Soutra Gilmour impose the theme of time by hanging a huge clock over the stage.
A time-lapse sequence reveals the perpetual human traffic of depositors and withdrawers, managers and tellers such as Adam Godley’s metronomic unnamed clerk. “The dead have their six feet between them and life,” he later declares, “but the living are buried so much deeper”.
Visually the production is often amazing. A transition from urban land- scape to the rural snow fields where the clerk temporarily hides is made by a single white sheet billowing out from a downstage door which spreads over the entire Lyttelton stage.
It’s great to see Godley back at the National. And as the lanky clerk realises the repercussions of his actions, his panicky reaction is priceless. And there’s fine support from Gina Bellman as an Italian lady of great poise.
Yet the star of the show is the invention of Still’s mind-expanding production. Though not even this can save the play from stalling in the final act where the clerk confesses his flaws to a Salvation Army meeting (you need a rendition of Sit Down You’re Rocking The Boat a la Guys and Dolls to do that).
But that does not diminish the thrill of the previous two hours.