Bucketloads of panache
Lloyd Evans
Thoroughly Modern Millie Shaftesbury Electra Gate
Thoroughly Modem Millie has a thor oughly disturbing storyline. An innocent flapper comes to New York and pitches up at a cheap guest-house run by the sinister Mrs Meers, a Chinese widow played by Maureen Lipman. Unknown to Millie, the hostel is actually a sorting depot for the white slave trade. Any girl considered sufficiently vulnerable is given a drugged apple, thrown into a laundry basket and shipped off to the Far East for a busy new life providing comfort for distressed businessmen while chained to a futon.
The New York papers are running scare-stories on the scam, but Millie and her wide-eyed girlfriends haven't the faintest idea that Mrs Meers is the traffick er-in-chief. Of course, no sane person would give an ounce of credence to this potty narrative, but, hey, this is a musical, isn't it? Check your disbelief in at the cloakroom.
Amanda Holden, as Millie, is blessed with those static looks that are not enhanced by newspaper photographs. In the flesh she comes across very differently, as a popsicle of intergalactic prettiness. That said, her acting is better suited to the screen than to the theatre. As for her voice, well, viewers of Pop Idol will be familiar with Simon Cowell's innovative grading system: Butlins (terrible). Cruise Ship (pretty bad), Average (average), Dark Horse (promising) and Top Ten (excellent). I'd give her Top Ten.
Though Holden is the figure who appears on the posters, the star of the show is Maureen Lipman. She brings everything she has to the role, and she has bucketloads. Panache, wit, pantomime exuberance, and an unexpected tragi-comic pathos. To her huge instinct for live comedy she adds an unlearnable knack of making minor grace-notes work in a theatre the size of an aircraft hanger. My guess is that this show will run for as long as Lipman cares to step up to the boilerplate.
So that's it. A great evening for everyone. Rave review finished. But I should point out, in all candour, that my pleasure was entirely synthetic. I left at the interval
and slunk home in a state of exhausted relief. Normally, I wouldn't go to a musical if you paid me. But they paid me so I went. I can't stand the damn things. Of all the methods that humans have contrived for diverting themselves in the evening, the musical is the most charmless and debased. It has no grace, modesty or decorum. Rather than concealing its art, it laboriously blazons every technical feat with a shameless flourish: 'Hal See how hard that was.' Mindless self-congratulation seeps from every pore of the beast. I was once told, after sitting long-faced through Oklahoma!, that I had 'no soul'. My accuser was wearing a widget in her face. I would dispute her view energetically. The Musical, a recent invention, would be incomprehensible to a pre-industrial society. Consider the song-and-dance routine. Its entire purpose is to reduce the glories of the moving body to a machine's dumb fluency. It's like Trooping the Colour with make-up. That these ceremonies of silliness are considered entertainment is proof of our deadened sensibility.
To be civilised, that is, to live in cities, means suppressing the eye's natural appetite for loveliness. Machine-made shapes dominate our environment. We ping like pinballs in identikit cars between homes and offices that are indistinguishable from each other. Our minds have been besieged and dulled by images of replication. Here, I believe, lies the unconscious source of the musical: the static visual texture of industrialisation applied to theatrical performance. When I watch a dance number — and I include anything from Atomic Kitten to West Side Story — I see the infinite grace and beauty that nature has invested in the human form transposed into treadmill acrobatics. It makes me want to run into the hills, rip my clothes off and scream. Widget Woman was wrong. Anyone who enjoys a musical has no soul.
Right. That's that off m'chest. Jean Giraudoux's Electra achieves a near-miracle. Literature's most gripping storyline is rendered flippant and suburban in this garrulous soap-opera. After the first act, I opted for the early bath, vowing never to give another second of my existence to this confused and blundering dramatist. And I went home wondering if I was really suited to this job. After all, I'm one of those self contained souls who regard play-going as an elaborate and pointless chore. Oddly enough though, just at present, London's impresarios seem to be aiming their productions at just such an audience.
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