Theatre
Music master
Kenneth Hurren Side by Side With Sondheim (Mermaid) Gigi by Colette and Anita Loos (Fortune) Endgame by Samuel Beckett (Royal Court)
At the riverside Mermaid they know a good formula for setting the Thames on fire and keeping themselves warm, and those shows anthologising the songs of the late Noel Coward and Cole Porter must have cast as cosy a glow over the theatre's bank account as over its audiences. Instant nostalgia set to music: just add singers and a linkman and leave it to the customers to pour . . in. Nearly everyone must have wondered whom they'd do next. Sammy Cahn, of course, has anthologised himself. Irving Berlin, sharp nonagenarian, keeps his copyrights tightly buttoned-up. Rodgers and Hammerstein? The Gershwins? In the event, they seemed to be taking rather a chance with Stephen Sondheim.
Except in the households of the discerning, not to say disenchanted, cognoscenti, his is not quite a household name. It is not, that is, one that springs nimbly to mind as identifying one of the supreme songwriters of our time. No hits are immediately associated with it (in fact, relatively few Sondheini songs have been hits: a handful from West Side Story and Gypsy, and 'Send In the Clowns' from A Little Night Music), conceivably because his songs are written, as he has put it, for 'dramatic situations within the proscenium arch— I'm not particularly interested in pop songs that stand on their own', and any independent renown they achieve is incidental, even accidental (as in the case of 'Everything's Coming Up Roses' which, in the context of Gypsy, is a whistle in the dark rather than the fervent celebration it otherwise appears to be). As for nostalgia, none of Sondheim's work goes back the quarter of a century that is statutory before this valuable merchandise is marketable.
In the teeth of these formidable odds, Side By Side With Sondheim is nevertheless a peach: 'a show,' I see I scrawled in my programme with just the merest touch of hyperbole, 'a show to make you fall in love with show business.' At least that simple and often childlike institution had grown up sufficiently, in the late 'fifties, to accommodate the sardonic wit, the literary grace and, ultimately, the questing musical talent (primarily in quest, perversely, of mood rather than melody but not infrequently achieving both) of Stephen Sondheim. He eased the genre gently into accepting his innovations—in his first two shows, West Side Story and Gypsy, for
which he wrote only the lyrics, he had his toes close to the traditional line and extended the form only slightly beyond the point where his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein, had left it—but later, as his lyrics began to take risks, playing with syllabic rhymes as ingeniously as Cole Porter's or veering extravagantly into lyric poetry, and as also he began to write his own music as well as the words, there came the great flowering of Company, Follies, A Little Night Music and, judging only from the snatch vouchsafed us in the Mermaid compilation, his current Broadway exhibit, Pacific Overtures.
It is the pleasure of the present show that these songs, each an integral part of the musical dramas for which they were essentially written, do 'stand on their own' —with just a little help from a clearly devoted friend, Ned Sherrin, who is urbanely at hand at a side-stage lectern, not only marking the progress of Sondheim's career with anecdotal footnotes discreetly balanced between reverence and scepticism, but succinctly outlining the context of the numbers. Three singers—Millicent Martin, Julia McKenzie and David Kernan —expertly encompass the vivacity, the tenderness, the cynicism and the impishness in the material. Stylishly but unspectacularly produced, and with but two pianos to accompany them, they fill the stage irresistibly for a couple of buoyant hours.
While songs deprived of their dramatic background can plainly be made to work, a little play called Gigi, with which the reverse procedure has been adopted, is out of luck. The idea of the gifts of Anita Loos and Colette being harnessed in the same cause was engagingly provocative to contemplate, but the distanced collaboration of these ladies—who, in their separate ways, had achieved vast renown for their researches into the liaisons of men and women—did not come about until both were at some remove from their best. Colette had written Gigi at the age of seventy, and Miss Loos's dramatisation of it, some thirty years after her own definitive handbook for the girl seeking to make a career of sex, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, had similar earmarks of a wilting interest in a favourite topic. It was never much of a play. That it became a popular moving picture was largely due to the songs with which Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner embellished it, and to revive it for the stage without those musical trimmings seems foolhardy.
Veronica Quilligan, to be sure, is a sprightly little actress and she has the appropriate gamine qualities for the sixteenyear-old heroine, the white sheep of a celebrated family of the Parisiandemi-monde of 1900, who harbours alarming aspirations to respectability. The senior ladies of her clan, dubious about marriages being made in heaven, have preferred to lay up for themselves treasures on earth by distributing their favours on a strictly cash basis, and the young Gigi is being instruct
ed according to the tenets of these formidable past-mistresses. She, despite much shrewd advice, mostly about diamonds being a girl's best friend (anything less than half a carat to be called a chip), rebels against the family tradition and successfully holds out for a less precarious arrangement. It is a flimsy fable, not improved by eccentric casting, casual direction and indifferent performances (attributable in part, perhaps, to the restrictions of an inadequate stage on to which the players have to edge cautiously to avoid knocking over the scenery), and despite the lively Miss Quilligan I fear it is not long for this world.
This world is the best world we've got, but its advantages are open to question at least in the philosophy of Samuel Beckett, whose Endgame is again bleakly in the parish. The monotonous vocal mannerisms of Patrick Magee (who plays the aged, chairbound, blind and dying Hamm) may be exactly right for this paean to pessimism, and though Stephen Rea is livelier as the servile Cloy, and Leslie Sarony and Rose Hill are remarkably chirpy as the two parents rotting in dustbins, the threads of the allegory still rather tend to run off my spool. I confess I am drawn to more lucid and vivacious forms of drama.
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