A show of abundant glories
This fresh production of at Dublin’s Bord Gáis Energy Theatre proves why the musical became a global smash, says
Ialmost feel sorry for Andrew Davies. This evening, viewers will tune in for the second instalment of his adaptation of Les Misérables on BBC One. If the first episode was anything to go by, viewers will again be gripped by magnifique acting, deluxe camerawork and the flinty representation of harsh 19th-century realities. But if his mission is – as he proclaimed to The Telegraph before Christmas – to rescue Victor Hugo’s 1862 masterpiece “from the clutches of that awful musical with its doggerel lyrics”, then, alas, he’s doomed to failure.
The fact that much of the general reaction has made allusion to the absence of song doesn’t so much assist Davies’s assertion as undermine it. The music of Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s magnum opus is in our bloodstream; it makes us readily susceptible to other interpretations, and must be thought too to stimulate an appetite for the full literary feast of the novel itself.
You can’t take away the musical’s influence. There’s no eradicating a show that has been seen by 70 million worldwide.
Were Davies able to get a seat in Dublin – the entire run is sold-out
– he might discover to his horror that, far from resembling a museumpiece, the show has seldom looked or sounded fresher and more youthful. This touring production, directed by Laurence Connor (with James Powell), discreetly dismantles some of the fustier effects of the wellworn, much-loved Trevor Nunn one (premiered in 1985 and still going strong in the West End), not least the heavily relied-upon revolving-stage.
Connor and Powell have recognised that the more you strip back, the more the audience is ready to commit imaginatively. Instead of being doggerel, Boublil and Herbert Kretzmer’s lyrics have a blade-sharp simplicity, which means the evening can move at a very modern velocity, without intelligibility being left behind. The music isn’t a tawdry, populist distraction from the “seriousness” of the narrative; it profoundly expresses it.
What might take reams of dialogue or painstaking camerawork can be done in a note, a repeated refrain, a heartbeat. Paule Constable, the lighting designer, pushes the murk to the max, so that the entire epic affair (a hurtling two and a half hours, taking in 28 numbers) embodies the story’s crucial psychological, philosophical and spiritual identification with those cast down in darkness seeking – and in some cases, mercifully seeing – the light. If at times you’re squinting (do you hear the people sing? Yes. Do see their facial expressions? Not so much), the payoff is that every beam acquires a searing force: you notice the way the set shimmers with golden possibility when Jean Valjean (a magnificent Killian Donnelly) first attempts to gain employment on being released from prison, then becomes shrouded again in gloom as he’s coldly sent on his way. When the urchin Gavroche is shot on the barricades, he’s transfigured by intersecting beams, acquiring messianic grace. And it’s not until the hope-filled, dreamy finale that we get sustained sunshine, banishing a nightmare that’s augmented by smudgy mise-en-scène inspired by Hugo’s crepuscular and mysterious sketches and drawings.
I’ve barely begun to skim the surface of the show’s abundant glories. Nic Greenshields’s ferociously dogged Javert raises the roof, while Katie Hall’s Fantine brings tears to the eyes with I Dreamed a Dream, and there’s not a weak link elsewhere. Not so much a juggernaut as a beast of elfin alacrity and magic, “The Glums” is guaranteed to be prompting nightly standing ovations long after tonight’s couch potatoes have gone on to graze on other TV costume-dramas.