Preposterous mix
Lloyd Evans
The Woman in White Palace Darwin in Malibu I Imilpsteart The Cheeky Chappie Union Not that it matters what a critic says. Andrew Lloyd Webber's new musical has installed itself at the Palace Theatre and it'll be parked there in all weathers for at least five years, I should think. Maybe ten. Any sardonic wag could spend an amusing hour taking leisurely potshots at it. The story is a preposterous mix of fairytale and Gothic horror. The characters are a tedious crew of scheming rotters and fretful virgins. The lyrics are two notches above cat-sat-on-the-mat level and the main love ballad, with its weirdly insipid couplet, 'I believe my heart. It believes in you!', sounds like a hymn written by a computer.
But all this is to miss the point. You wouldn't judge a wedding cake by the standards usually applied to confectionery. What's required is a ceremonial display, a forceful impression of grandeur, magnificence and laborious ornament. This show meets those requirements with consummate adequacy. Of course, it takes quite a mental leap to recall that its ennobled author, Lord Lloyd Webber, was once the Marilyn Manson of the West End. Coachloads of grey-haired evangelists mounted pickets outside his shows. Now they want tickets.
Most of the show's creative energies have been expended on the artificial sets. These are electronically doctored cybervistas projected on to moveable flats. As each scene changes, we go barrelling around the country from splendid castles to gloomy graveyards, from sparkly waterfalls to grotesque slums, from a howling lunatic asylum to a sumptuous Mayfair salon, and so on. Yet none of these ingenious scenarios quite succeeds in convincing the eye. The faked visual environment has the same eerie unshadowed quality of the Buzz Lightyear movies; it doesn't feel
enough like real life to make you give up trying to work out what's wrong with it. But from a banker's point of view these sets are nothing short of miraculous. The show can be franchised around the world with zero expenditure on scenery. Zero! Thus tens of thousands are deleted from the start-up costs. And the entire cast, I noticed, numbered no more than 25. That's pretty small for a big musical.
Sheer curiosity will tempt many to see this show, and if you make the investment be prepared to muck in with the unlovely hordes of once-a-year theatre-trippers. It's the booze-cruise crowd in their Sunday best. You'll find the staff at the Palace Theatre expertly drilled in the extraction of money. 'Same again for the interval?' asked the barman automatically, as I ordered two pre-show glasses of plonk. `No,' I said with courageous thrift. Just as well. 'Tastes like feet,' was my companion's verdict. Not cheap feet either. Ten quid the pair.
The new play at Hampstead has a semipromising idea. Take Charles Darwin and a couple of his old sparring partners, dump them in a beach-hut in California and watch them slug it out on the subjects of God. Christian dogma, scientific belief and all that. Quite how the ghosts wound up in Malibu is unclear, but towards the end of the first act there's a line about California being purgatory. This is what's known as 'a
joke' in showbiz circles and it's nice to see one in the Hampstead Theatre. The writer, Crispen Whittell, has lumbered himself with a serious technical problem: how to make ghosts work dramatically. There's nothing at stake for them. The dead can't act or make choices or influence their own or anyone else's destiny. The result is that there's no story, just an awful lot of jabber. Having selected a fascinating and manylayered subject for his play, Whittell assumes that his viewers will only be interested if he treats it as knockabout comedy. He's not much of a comic writer, alas, and the script is nothing more than a series of amiable but unfunny sketches. Fear of tautology constrains me from calling it Radio Four Lite but it feels like the kind of show they broadcast on weekdays at 6.30 p.m. while you're making the fudge. Rigorously shallow intellectual muzak. The Guardian, I was pleased to see, found it 'fiercely intelligent'.
The Union Theatre might be generously described as 'atmospheric'. Tucked away in a railway arch on the South Bank, it smells of old grannies, but it's well worth a visit to see Jamie Kenna's immaculate portrayal of Max Miller. Technically flawless, he captures not just the Cheekie Chappie's mannerisms and accent but his essence as well, that sly, seedy, saucy innocence. This is a hugely enjoyable show and it belongs in a much bigger venue.
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