Theatre
Fosse (Prince of Wales) Swan Lake (Dominion) The Servant to Two Masters (Young Vic) A Lump in My Throat (Grace, Battersea)
Routine Fosse
Sheridan Morley
This is where I get high-kicked out of the Broadway Musicals Appreciation Soci- ety, maybe even the Critics Circle itself. Precisely when, how and indeed why did Bob Fosse cease being one of the top half- dozen postwar Broadway choreographers and become Fosse, a man around whose memory people now dance as worshipfully and repetitively as if he had personally invented the Great White Way itself ?
It helps, presumably, to have a widow (Gwen Verdon) and an ex-mistress (Ann Reinking) who, great dancers in their own right, are prepared apparently to devote the rest of their working lives to the ritual cele- bration of Bob's big-band memory, and to turn his choreography into an international franchise, Broadway Bob's Ballet, knees and elbows while you wait. Quite soon we shall doubtless be inaugurating the Royal Bob Fosse School of Dancing, with a grant from the Prime Minister and a resident home in the disused Millennium Dome. But what, apart from elbows and knees and tilt- ed bowler hats, did Fosse himself actually give the musical theatre to justify this slavish attention to his incredibly repetitive and predictable dance routines?
Nobody is suggesting that Fosse was not once a towering figure in the choreography of the Broadway musical, even if he was as neurotic about his own short stature as about so much else; it was Fosse who rein- vented dancing as a form of nervous break- down. But have we ever had a show devoted to the choreography of Agnes de Mille, or Bob Avian, or George Balan- chine, or Michael Bennett, or Gower Champion, or Gillian Lynne, or Michael Kidd, or Herb Ross, or Tommy Tune, or Onna White? And are we seriously main- taining that he was more significant, more influential, more talented than any of the above? If not, why Fosse? Even if we were agreed that he deserved nearly three hours of our undivided attention, there is a major problem with this reverent compilation, which is that if you take away all the plot, characters and songs from these old musi- cals then you are left with nothing but dance routines which look much too alike when batched together back to back and, relentlessly, elbow to knee.
There are only two moments when this show actually leaps into life; one when they do the 'Steam Heat' which was Fosse's call- ing card and his finest ten minutes, and the other when they do 'Mr Bojangles', the only number he ever choreographed that had real drama and heart and told a story. Who died and made Bob Fosse God? Bob Fosse did; but his heaven will, I think, soon collapse of its own accord. On Broadway, ghosts have nearly as rough a time as angels.
It was also a little unfortunate to have Fosse open the night after the return to the West End of a vastly more innovative and intriguing contemporary choreographer, Matthew Bourne, whose genius has always been very simple to explain: he takes great ballets and turns them into greater theatre. Swan Lake is now back at the Dominion for a farewell season after five years in which it has triumphed everywhere from Sadler's Wells through the West End and Broadway to California, winning a dozen major stage awards along the way.
Adam Cooper is still the astonishingly sexy Chief Swan, while Isabel Mortimer and Vicky Evans opened wonderfully as the sexually predatory Queen and her son's wildly unsuitable girlfriend. Originally, this Swan Lake seemed to have something to say about Prince Charles and Princess Diana; five years down the historical line, its references now reach back to Hamlet and Mayerling and even Noel Coward's The Vortex, all those tales of anguished young princelings and overbearing mothers with sexual agendas of their own, not to men- tion just a hint of incest. Ruritania has always been an interesting country of the mind, where royalty and madness and dou- ble identity come with the passport; Lez Brotherston's madly grandiose sets give this Swan Lake the feel of an old Palladium pantomime run riot, but the true brilliance of Bourne is to have taken all these themes and used them to reinvent a dance about a dying swan. The director Tim Supple- returns in tri- umph to the Young Vic he once managed with an altogether brilliant reworking of Goldoni's Servant to Two Masters (yes, that 'to' was more usually translated as 'of) which, in Lee Hall's stunning new adapta- tion, comes back to us as though it had been written yesterday rather than in 1745. True, the plot is much as it was, and the traditions are still those of commedia dell'arte: stock characters, pratfalls, mistak- en identity, lovers divided, lovers reunited, something for everyone, a comedy tonight. But this new staging, a co-production with the Royal Shakespeare Company which is firing on all cylinders for the first time in about three years, has discovered a comic genius called Jason Watkins, who plays the title character not as the usual manic idiot but instead a man who, all too aware of the political and social class structure of Venice in the 18th century, has decided to serve two masters simultaneously, and without their knowledge, as the only route to his own financial and professional sur- vival. So what we have here is now a come- dy of manners as well as a farce; Supple and Watkins have devised some wondrous business with clothes hampers and trays of food, and Watkins does some brilliant semi-impromptu work using the audience as his assistant conjurors, but we never lose sight of the essentially serious message of Goldoni, the one about there being one law for the rich and another for their ser- vants. This is a wry, touching, infinitely clever reminder that dying is easy, comedy is hard; moreover, if farce is played with an essential seriousness and utter credibility. and if most of the laughs come from the utter logic of the character and situation. however eccentrically arrived at, then we are more than halfway home.
At the Grace in Battersea, Victoria Coren makes a tremendously impressive treble-debut as producer, director and adapter of A Lump in My Throat, a solo staging of the writing of John Diamond, the Times columnist who for the last three years has charted with incredible courage and good humour the loss of his voice and much else due to cancer. Unlike Jeffrey Bernard, Diamond is happily still with us, but what the actor Robert Katz and his director have realised is that here too an entire life can be recreated on stage simply through edited highlights from a brilliant sequence of personal columns.
What separates Diamond from those many others who have recently written of cancer as a personal experience is his won- derfully wry, often bloody-minded approach to the everyday hospital realities and he is, mercifully, not going gently into any good night. If there is a God, he is not going at all; not just for his sake, but for ours.
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