Theatre
Always (Victoria Palace) Adieu Jacques (Jermyn Street) Closer (Cottesloe)
Wallis and Vomit
Sheridan Morley
Not perhaps the greatest of weeks for stage musicals, what with Andrew Lloyd Webber declaring losses of around £10 mil- lion for his Really Useful Group on this side of the Atlantic alone, and the new Abdication musical at the Victoria Palace already unkindly known backstage as 'Wal- lis and Vomit'.
What is it, I have long wondered, about musicals that brings out the absolute worst in London drama critics? No, this is not going to be a defence of Always, essentially because there is no real defence of it; the show is indeed very nearly as terrible as most reviews have been telling you these last few days. But imagine we had been dealing with a truly terrible Hamlet or Seagull, and believe me I have seen a few of those in my time; would the Guardian have solemnly published a box detailing the last half-dozen classical West End disas- ters? Or would my revered friend in the Daily Telegraph have noted that 'it wasn't quite as bad as we had been hoping'?
Just who are 'we', and why do we sit around hoping for musicals to fail? If you were starting out to write or produce a new London musical now, my immediate advice would be to stop. Write something •hugely ambitious and operatic like Martin Guerre and you will be told that it is basically too long and too French and not as good as Les Miserables, though after that show had been selling out for more than a decade my colleagues have conveniently forgotten how savage they were about that one originally. Write in the shadow of Sondheim and you'll be told it's only for a small, gay Mafia of Broadway revenge freaks. Write a populist contemporary score with a feel- good Neil Simon joke-book and The Good- bye Girl closes within weeks. Write a really dangerous, cutting-edge sexual satire set in the White House and The Fix is also a com- mercial disaster. Write a bland Ivor Novel- lo nostalgia epic and we are back to the collapse of Always.
The critical message is, therefore, that no musical is a good musical, and what could well happen now is precisely what hap- pened in California 30 years ago when the selfsame critical message was sent out; stu- dios not bent on financial suicide simply stopped making them, and I for one still miss them very much indeed.
Even so, there is precious little to be said in defence of Always; written by a couple of young men who would seem never to have heard of Crown Matrimonial or the ITV Edward Fox series or even any of the great songs of the period from Coward and Porter to Maschwitz and 'I've Danced With A Man, Who's Danced With A Girl, Who's Danced With The Prince Of Wales', they have cobbled together a weird little Wind- sor wonderland, one which neatly sidesteps the few intriguing aspects of Edward and Wallis, notably his latent fascism and her reputed sexual athleticism.
Clive Carter and Jan Hartley are thus left with a couple of cardboard cut-outs, and a supporting cast led by Shani Wallis as her aunt with even less; oddly enough I once got to know both the Windsors briefly on a Venice beach circa 1955, by which time they were a thoroughly cantankerous old couple deeply resembling their own ghastly Pekinese dogs. But even then, to a 12-year-old child, there was something more interesting about them than is ever suggested here in a show which goes for instantly shallow stage cartoon characters when it is not dealing in waxworks. A scene in France? Right then, we'll have a bloke in a beret with a concertina; I suppose we were just lucky they didn't put him on a bicycle selling onions while doing his tacky Chevalier impression. 'This kind of stress I don't need' sings the once-and-never King, and one knows exactly how he feels as yet one more lavish production number dies on its dancing feet all around him.
Another question is where the choreog- rapher-director Thommie Walsh has been since 1950; it is one thing to organise peri- od pieces, quite another to stage them as if they were still current. His co-director, the infinitely more classical Frank Hauser, does what he can with a few all-too-brief political scenes, but just as any of them threaten to come to life we are hurled back into yet another fashion show, cocktail party or, worst of all, choirs of loveable Welsh miners singing of their devotion to treacherous Eddie.
But worse than the choreography, or the dialogue, or the lyrics, or the music, or the acting is the realisation that nobody involved in this whole calamity seems to have had the faintest idea of the true peri- od details of this perennially fascinating class warfare. A visit to the current Broad- way Titantic might have helped, but as for Always I fear the Cunard they have tried to recapture is not so much Lady Emerald, who puts in a shaky appearance, as one of the liners of that name which now lies well and truly sunk. At Jermyn Street, Noel Harrison (whose father might just about have got away with Always given a Lerner-Loewe score) makes a welcome return to Britain after 30 years in Canada and Los Angeles with Adieu Jacques, a thoughtful and very touching account of the life and songs of Jacques Brel, sung in French but with a wistful, wondrous English commentary.
And the best is last: on the Cottesloe stage of the National, Patrick Marber's sec- ond play, Closer, not only lives up to the promise of his Dealer's Choice but is an even sharper and more tense account of relationships in total moral and sexual breakdown. This is Private Lives for the late Nineties, a story of four people who can live neither together nor apart but whose electric attraction to each other filially burns all of them out in a shock ending which has in fact been very carefully pre- pared if only we could have seen it coming. Like Coward but precious few others, Mar- ber has a remarkable talent for making us fall in love with appalling people, and here their fatal attraction is what drives the play across the borders of comedy and tragedy. Not since David Hare's Skylight, about to reappear at the Vaudeville, has there been a British play about sexual politics with such raw energy and throat-catching reali- ty, and in Marber's own production the quartet of mismatched lovers are equally breathtakingly played by Sally Dexter, Cia- ran Hinds, Liza Walker and Clive Owen. Like Skylight, Closer will also have a long West End and Broadway life when it leaves the South Bank; but catch it there while it is still fresh off the typewriter.
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