Music and mayhem
Lloyd Evans Tony Blair – the Musical Gilded Balloon Tony! The Blair Musical Chambers St Yellow Hands St George's West Jihad: the Musical Chambers St The Bacchae King's Theatre Here's the formula for satire at the Fringe. Take a scary concept, stick `the musical' after it and you've got a catchy title and an audience. Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Saddam, Osama — all been done before. This year it's Blair. Twice over, in fact. Like we haven't had enough of him? Tony Blair — the Musical is so toothless it belongs in an old people's home. The cast are genial but the presentation is slapdash. Tony's floppy fringe droops down to his nose, Gordon's Scots accent is missing, Mandy wears a beard and Prezza is played by a lanky redhead. A few good things: Clare Short is brilliantly done as a truculent hysteric who rasps out an over-Brummy dialect through clenched teeth, and Blunkett gets laughs by bumping into chairs and making speeches to people who are standing behind him Sadie the Labrador appears as a glove puppet who scans Blunkett's notes and whispers them into his ear. That's clever and funny but the rest is so warm-hearted and accepting of New Labour that it might have been written by David Cameron. Big crowds, though.
Anyway, don't confuse this with Tony! The Blair Musical, which is far wittier and more cutting. James Duckworth is an astutely stumbling Blair, his charisma undercut by a shifty and relentless niceness. The script has claws. The ghost of Diana shows up to boost Tony's morale. 'Have you come far?' he asks, 'only the traffic's murder out there. Doh, er, whoops.' And when Blair cements his relationship with Bush he comments, 'From the start, we clicked. I had the brains. He had the nuclear arsenal.' Duckworth's brilliance is to bring out the private and uncertain Blair who lies behind the messianic yuppie on public display. A perfect slice of Fringe comedy.
Yellow Hands bored me stiff for ten minutes: a quartet of German musicians showing off customised instruments. So what? An organ made from plastic pipes and a glockenspiel made from flowerpots. But as more and more instruments arrived and as their technical ingenuity advanced I realised I was being given a fascinating lesson in musical technology. Stretch a wire across a soundboard and you've got a guitar. These guys have made stringed instruments out of an oil barrel, a chest of drawers, the seat of a chair, a wheelbarrow, a golf club and an empty can. There's a piano made from footballs and a saxophone fashioned from a toilet U-bend. It's a whole new genre. Satirical ironmongery. The show climaxes with 'Smoke on the Water' played on car exhausts that explode into fireworks. Mad, charming and brilliant. If Stomp can prosper in the West End so can this.
Jihad: the Musical (yes, that ole formula) is a crude and gutsy piece of pro-American propaganda. A good laugh too, unless you're a Muslim, in which case it'll feel like a sermon funded by the CIA. Maybe it is funded by the CIA. The subtlety level is pretty high. One of the more sophisticated lines is delivered by Sayid, an Afghan dimwit forced to join a terror camp. 'Explain again,' he asks his indoctrinators, 'why earthquakes are caused by Western decadence?' His classmate encourages him, 'You will soon see things our way — when you stop listening to anyone who disagrees with us.' The French are attacked in 'Turned and Ran', a song devoted to their reverse-gear tendencies which is far too obvious to bite, but elsewhere the show is funny and makes the most of its sweaty, cramped, late-night slot.
Far from the Fringe, at the International Festival, Alan Cumming has returned from Broadway to play Dionysus in The Bacchae. The production is orchestrated with lots of crash bang wallop by John Tiffany. Highly absorbing. And Cumming is an absolute delight, although I'm not sure why. He seems limited, as Marilyn Monroe was, to a few devices. A bit of camp swagger, a bit of pouting allure, and a tricksiness that doesn't feel tricksy even as it tricks you. So you want more and more of him Maybe that's it. An ungraspable watchability that marks the difference between mere starriness and real stardom. When he's off-stage the show flattens a little but this is a gripping, flashy and stimulating piece of theatre. David Greig's demotic script is archly knowing. When Dionysus humiliates the arrogant Pentheus he boasts, 'That's what happens when man bites god.' Most unusually for a Greek tragedy (let's be honest for once) the show is genuinely entertaining rather than just being 'profound' or 'essential' — code for dull as hell.
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