Packing 'em in
Lloyd Evans Wicked Apollo, Victoria Postcards from God Jemlyn Street What Would Judas Do?; Product: World Remix Bush Wicked is a musical based on the early life of the Wicked Witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz. So what's wrong with it, apart from the subject obviously? Well, if you go to a musical you don't expect to spend three hours denied the pleasure of a hummable tune, a decent gag, an engaging storyline or any attempt at an ensemble dance routine. The bald, belt-'em-out singing style doesn't help, nor does the gaudy declarative acting. On the plus side, the scenery is spectacular, and there's a massive articulated dragon's head over the stage which flexes its iron neck and creaks its metal jaws while racking out groans of pain. It's very impressive until you spot a puffing stage-hand in the wings yanking on a rope-and-pulley system. The groans of pain are probably his. If I'd seen this show at an earlier stage I'd have told them to pack up and start again. But Wicked is doing great business. I went on a Tuesday night and the 2,400-seat Apollo theatre, triple the size of some West End venues, was a dozen bums short of a full house.
Clearly, I can't spot a successful musical, so bear that in mind when I say that Postcards from God: The Sister Wendy Musical may be going places. Sister Wendy, the rabbit-toothed multi-tasking nun, held down a career as a BBC art historian while also spending 72 hours praying every day. The show is based, a little too closely, on the truth. Wendy is called to God while still in her teens and she takes orders as a 'consecrated hermit and virgin' with the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur. The convent's atmosphere of euphoric innocence and slightly trippie religious certitude is superbly evoked.
Then, suddenly and rather inexplicably, Wendy is transformed from ascetic recluse to international star. I was expecting her relationship with her all-forgiving TV producer (excellently played by Juliet Gough) to be a lot stormier. Wendy is an eccentric who works without a script CI don't like to over-prepare') and when she's let off the leash she toddles around famous galleries gassing on about religious masterpieces while a film crew chases her across the parquet floors. Plenty of scope there for conflict between the warring faiths of television and God, but this show is a whimsical, soft-hearted beast and avoids such cosmopolitan temptations. The authors are more interested in writing tunes that make you tap your toes, and creating neat visual devices like the Botticelli angels who step out of their frames and join Wendy in a chorus. Sister Wendy isn't quite the finished article but if the script were given more dramatic bite it could have potential. An unexpected blessing is Andrea Miller, who plays half-a-dozen small parts, and turns each into a marvel of dead-pan wit.
Stewart Lee's new show at the Bush professes to retell the story of Judas Iscariot. Which sounds very interesting. In fact it's a quick skedaddle through the Easter story with footnotes written by a stand-up comedian. Which sounds very boring.
Infinitely better is Mark Ravenhill's accompanying piece, a daring and highly intelligent satire on the war against terror and the conflict between Western individualism and nihilistic Islam. The scene is a film mogul's office where a middle-aged director is pitching a script to a beautiful Alist British star. She says nothing throughout. The film, Mohammed and Me, is about a 9/11 widow who falls in love with a suicide bomber. Osama bin Laden orders Mohammed to blow up Disneyland Paris in a co-ordinated suicide blitz on Europe. The widow offers to die alongside her lover but at the last minute she backs out and calls the police. Mohammed is shipped off to Guantanamo Bay but she misses him so desperately that she gets herself trained in every conceivable martial art, flies to Cuba and springs him from Camp X-Ray.
There are a few more beats to the story but the details don't matter so much as the narrative itself, which is supercharged with energy, crammed with juicy moral contradictions and which dances on a razor's edge between credibility and absurdity. This feels like a brand-new artistic genre, a state-ofthe-nation cartoon in the form of an hourlong monologue. I've never been a big fan of Ravenhill but this piece is both extraordinarily innovative and, most thrillingly, completely amoral. At times I felt I was watching the work of the devil himself. An excellent and, literally, a dangerous play. I hope it doesn't make him shorter by a head.
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