Theatre
Ashes to Ashes (Ambassadors) World Musical of the Year (Aarhus, Denmark) Sarrasine (Lyric Hammersmith)
Disturbing hour
Sheridan Morley
Something vet.), curious seems to have happened with what I would reckon to be the straight-play event of the London year: the world premiere of Harold Pinter's Ashes to Ashes. In a taut, often almost unbearably tense 60 minutes, we are intro- duced to just two characters: a woman who has been brutalised and a man who may or may not have been her and her nation's political and sexual torturer.
Traditional Pinter ambiguities are here, as well as the familiar pauses and the half- remembered reference to lost songs or movies; but I believe Ashes to Ashes to be one of his greatest plays and am utterly bemused by how few of my colleagues, with the notable exception of his new biogra- pher Michael Billington, seem to share this view. In Pinter's own eerily still production, Lindsay Duncan perfectly exists on the bor- derlines of fact and fantasy, memory and imagination; Stephen Rea has a little more difficulty, his natural Irish charm some- times oddly ill at ease with the terrors that lie deep in the duologue.
This great and greatly disturbing drama is to be found at the Ambassadors, one of the two West End theatres (the other being the Duke of York's) which the Royal Court company are temporarily occupying while the builders are remodelling their usual Sloane Square home. But in a fit of ludi- crous megalomania the Court are actually putting their name up in neon over these historic theatres (I guess we are lucky not to have them renamed the Stephen Daldry One and Two after the current Court man- ager) thereby causing infinite confusion among tourists and cab drivers, since the theatres will naturally revert to their real names anyway next summer. I intend to go on calling them by their correct and historic names and am amazed that their landlords have allowed this shameful hijack.
And now let's hear it for Denmark's sec- ond city: with a population of barely 600,000, Aarhus may not be the centre of the known showbiz world, but they have just achieved there something never con- templated by the West End or Broadway or Hollywood: the first-ever international con- test for new musicals. At a cost of around £2 million (cheap at the price when you recall that the Eurovision Song Contest annually costs five), one of the city's largest employers, the audio-visual firm of Bang & Olufson, together with local orchestral and television interests, staged last weekend a contest which drew over 300 entries from 20 countries.
The finalists (two American, one British) won prizes of around £100,000 and the chance to have 30 minutes of each score staged by Julia McKenzie with an all-star cast of British and American singers, led by Al Jarreau, Denis Quilley, Joanna Riding, Clive Carter and John Barrowman, hosted by Sir Peter Ustinov for live all-Scandina- vian television and radio coverage and the audience in Aarhus's magnificent new con- cert hall.
It was a good night for the British George Stiles (the young composer of the Just So musical) who had two winners with his new scores for Peter Pan and The Three Musketeers, both of which I now long to see in full production, especially the latter which is a light, brisk, witty and tuneful gal- lop through the old swashbuckler. The same cannot alas be said for another of the finalists, a hilariously terrible account of the brief life and times of the Scots poet Robbie Burns entitled Red, Red Rose: best resembling an unholy marriage of Which Witch? and Brigadoon (unbelievably, the late Gene Kelly was once set to direct it) this is a spectacularly awful dollop of pseu- do-Scots kitsch which even Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald might have had trouble surviving with straight faces.
Its book has to be heard not to be believed (There'll be other girls for you, Robbie Burns' and 'They tell me he was the finest poet Scotland has ever seen') and a mass finale singing of a medley of Burns's hit 'Auld Lang Syne' defeated even the elsewhere brilliant staging of Julia McKen- zie. John Barrowman gives a performance in perfect keeping with the breathtaking awfulness of its surroundings, and I fear Red, Red Rose is already a Burned-out case which we are unlikely, mercifully, ever to have to see or hear again.
The overall winner was a lot more intriguing: two stars of the Stratford, Ontario, acting team, the husband and wife Craig Bohlmer and Marion Adler, have come up with a vastly ambitious chamber musical of Molnar's The Guardsman. Intel- ligent, witty and lyrically very astute, this has a dozen songs which wonderfully over- come the plodding familiarity of a one-joke plot, and if the first rule of musicals is only to write them around plays that really need some songs then The Guardsman perfectly fits that bill; a studio staging next year at Chichester is already mooted, and The Guardsman amply justifies this first, momentous contest hopefully to be repeat- ed in 1998.
And finally, at the Lyric Hammersmith, Sarrasine is kind of amazing: Neil Bartlett's musical about a castrato called La Zam- binella has been about a bit on the road in workshop productions but can and should be seen in all its decayed grandeur in a per- fect Hammersmith setting. Sara Kestelman as the narrator figure, obsessed by Zam- binella's unique voice and bizarre lifestyle, is majestically cool in counterpoint to the great Bette Bourne's drag act in a produc- tion of wondrously over-the-top camp the- atricality, only there till 12 October.
'Ooh, congratulations.'
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