Relocating St Tropez to Blackpool? What a drag!
La Cage Aux Folles is set in the South of France in a nightclub run by an ageing gay couple. Georges is the joint’s MC, Albin is his partner of many years and the venue’s drag queen.
The brilliant trick of this 1983 musical is to combine a French farce and a cabaret with a middleaged romance. It comes with
Jerry Herman’s rich, melodic score that includes the torchy
I Am What I Am (now a gay anthem) and the fabulous The
Best Of Times.
This version is enjoyable but gets one fundamental terribly wrong. I blame the director Tim Sheader. Why relocate a show set in a nightclub in St Tropez to a mildewing venue that evokes Blackpool? And is that why the cast have northern accents?
If you can get over the Anglicised nonsense you’ll have fun. The farce involves a crisis when Georges’s son (the product of a one-off hetero fling) gets engaged to the daughter of a politician whose mission is to clean up the homosexual smut of the Riviera. The in-laws have to meet. That requires Albin, seldom out of a frock, to impersonate the boy’s mother.
The plot twists are interspersed with scintillating, high-kicking cabaret numbers performed in huge wigs and spangled crotches – all with whip-cracking choreography by Stephen Mear.
As for Georges (Billy Carter) and Albin (Carl Mullaney), they are to me more likeable than loveable.
That said, the show belts out its happy message to cheers from the summer-deprived audience.
In Stratford, Falkland Sound is a banal new play about the 1982 conflict staged by the dysfunctional Royal Shakespeare Company, which is getting long overdue new artistic management. The Swan Theatre was built to stage plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, a hugely rich vein of drama that in recent years has been neglected, often for the sake of new plays that are not up to snuff. This latest is like a threehour episode of The Archers – with the occasional bang.
Brad Birch has culled his material from published islanders’ testimony and divvied it up between a multi-tasking cast of locals: a farmer, a teacher, an old bag, a mum, a jack-of-all-trades and so on, all with country bumpkin accents. A polite Argentine officer and a
Mancunian British marine represent the two sides at war.
When the invasion kicks off, one resident complains of ‘having to sit through some crap afternoon play’ on the radio while waiting for the news. I know how she felt.
This drama never arrives or goes away. It has nothing much to say about the conflict and no tension. Not even a wind machine.
Bouts of Eighties pop music and lame satire run through it. Tory grandees harrumph with jingoistic fervour and the finale has Mrs Thatcher portrayed, inevitably, as a permed megalomaniac valkyrie.
Of course there’s no similarly unflattering role for the Argentinian junta’s torturer-inchief, General Galtieri.
Above the stage hangs a circle of rifles, all aimed menacingly at the labouring cast. Oh how I wanted to shout ‘Open fire!’ and get it all over with.