Theatre
Song and dance
Giles Gordon
Blood Brothers (Lyric) The Rivals (National: Olivier) Antony and Cleopatra (The Pit) A Midsummer Night's Dream (National: Lyttelton)
T n Blood Brothers, Willy Russell narrates I in words and music the sad ballad of the Johnstone twins, Mickey and Eddie, killed on the same day. He gives a new and mov- ing twist to The Dance of Death, with the Devil or Devil's man stalking the ill-starred brothers from their conception. Dancing is the theme: dancing as courtship, copula- tion, creation and, violent death.
The twins are born to Mrs Johnstone (the radiant Barbara Dickson), a working-class Liverpool woman with quite a family already, deserted by her man before the boys' birth. She is persuaded by Mrs Lyons, the sterile lady for whom she does, to hand over one of the twins when born. Conve- niently, her husband, an earnest businessman, is away for nine months but returns to find himself a father. As the boys grow up, their mothers endeavour to keep them apart, one a middle-class, blazered schoolboy, the other not. But to no avail. Eddie and Mickey befriend one another, discover they were born on the self-same day, and swear a pact to be blood brothers. They grow up and, of course, fall for the same girl. Mickey marries her, Eddie has an affair with her. The cuckolded and, by then, out of work Mickey kills Councillor Eddie Lyons, coincidentally learning that they're brothers. The police gun him down.
The story is as basic, archetypal, as Robin Hood, Ned Kelly or Peter Pan (with which latter there are parallels). If there are five plots in the universe that is theatre, three or four of them are here. Being a musical, or more accurately a play with songs, the lives depicted are pared to essentials. But the detail of the observation is rich and accu- rate, and the strong feeling communicated, anguishedly true. Stylistically, the show may derive from Victorian melodrama but it's given contemporary relevance.
The ferret-faced narrator's biting couplets are punchily authentic. Andrew C. Wadsworth and George Costigan play Ed- die and Mickey with dignity and a wealth of characterisation: these are lives you know by the end of the evening, and have gained in knowing them. Not the least of the pro- duction's sureness of touch is that the middle-class milieu isn't sent up, or the working-class lives senlmentalised. Kate Fitzgerald is the scratchy girl they both love and one marries; her desire, to be a bride
and only later to wonder about love.
Chris Bond and Danny Hiller direct the Liverpool Playhouse production with con- stant ingenuity and technical expertise. As for Barbara Dickson, she sings as ravishing- ly, touchingly as Judy Collins. The band is great although, as usual, brutalising amplification assumes the cast can't project and the audience is deaf. Blood Brothers is as authentic theatre as Sweeney Todd or Annie, and if you relished either or both you'll be moved. I'd be even mote euphoric if I hadn't invested £250 in the show last year before becoming your drama critic.
The architecture of late 18th-century Bath in John Gunter's stunning set dwarfs but doesn't altogether diminish Sheridan's characters in Peter Wood's sparkling revival of The Rivals. It has to be worrying, though, that whenever a set succeeds on the vast and intractable Olivier stage it in- evitably is the star of the production and the actors merely players. Sheridan's masterpiece and Mr Wood's portrayal of his society teem with life and detail. Bruce Snyder, a designer new to me, has created the most elegant costumes on the London stage. Geraldine McEwan is a coquettish, handsome and alarmingly young Mrs Malaprop whose verbal misadventures are delivered at high speed and as if newly minted. Her vocal range, from piping squeaks to eagle soars, is a joy. Her mysteries are indeed perforated. Tim Curry's Bob Acres is more upwardly mobile than usual. There is a wonderful mix of ac- cents in this cosmopolitan Bath, including Edward Petherbridge's devious Morn- ingside as Faulkland, Niall Buggy's Dublin Sir Lucius Trigger, too much RADA (and I don't mean the clearly spoken and well- characterised Julia of Fiona Shaw), no Mummerset and lots of Somerset.
Sir Michael Hordern is absolutely Sir An- thony. He starts the evening — blue-coated, gout-ridden — looking like a map of some long-neglected continent. As events pro- gress, intrigues intrigue, his face resembles an increasingly reused envelope, his voice the crumpled and abused letter therein. The white-gloved hands flap and flutter like mating pigeons, the very eyebrows ogle, as the throat rumbles, growls and explodes, providing commentary on his own words as he utters them.
Last year's RSC Antony and Cleopatra has transferred from The Other Place at Stratford to The Pit in London although it would be more suited to the main Barbican theatre: Adrian Noble directs grandly. Helen Mirren as Cleopatra has crimped hair and is gift-wrapped, in gold for her demise. She sounds and looks hauntingly like Peggy Ashcroft in the same part at Stratford in 1953. Michael Gambon, suggesting a well- fed Ken Livingstone, is a resonant and barrel-chested Antony. You could believe this middle-aged, spoilt and rather boring couple's gaudy nights. Their tired eroticism seems, in the early scenes, but another sex- ual coupling. Once they're parted and join life's losers — screw up rather than screw their love for one another seems heartfelt. But it's too late by then, although each takes for ever to die, especially Cleopatra. The best performance is Bob Peck's acer- bic, ironical Enobarbus, a Thersites finally come to judgment. It's not Mr Peck's fault that his death is more moving than that of Antony or Cleopatra. Another Shakespeare transfer is Bill Bryden's relentlessly slow and, mainly, drably-spoken village-hall A Midsummer Night's Dream, from the Cottesloe. It runs 23A hours without an interval, which is in- sulting first to Shakespeare, then to those in the audience concerned to concentrate on the play, then to the NT's bar revenue. It hasn't, evidently, been redirected for the new theatre as people in the stalls couldn't see much of the action on the front of the steep rake. The mechanicals' humour has grown broader, slacker. The lovers are even duller than they were. The fairies remain the production's great strength, ghostly Elizabethan portraits. Susan Fleetwood is glorious as Titania, Jack Shepherd worldlY- wise as Puck. Robert Stephens's Oberon has seen it all before but remains amazed at human frailty.
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