Anything Goes (National Tour) The Ramayana (National Theatre) Clockwatching (Orange Tree, Richmond)
It's deghastly
Sheridan Morley
The trouble with Anything Goes is that nothing does. At the start of a six-month tour, this new production (which I caught in its Wimbledon week) already looks so flat and slow and ragged around the edges that you would think it was coming to an end after several years on the road, rather than just going out there for the first time.
Disgracefully undercast and underfinanced, it also comes as a useful reminder that even Cole Porter had his duds. True, the augmented score is (or would be, were it sung even remotely adequately) breathtaking, featuring as it does such all-time classics as 'I Get A Kick Out Of You', 'You're The Top', 'Easy To Love', 'It's Delovely' and 'Blow, Gabriel, Blow', as well of course as the title number.
But what was brilliantly disguised a decade or so ago, in London by Elaine Paige and on Broadway by Patti LuPone, is that the book is a total shambles. The leading lady has only one solo song after intermission, there is no great final number (so they have to reprise all the others very quickly), and such plot as there was in Act I has been rightly abandoned by Act II. The show in short resembles an old Broadway revue, of the kind that Cole Porter had indeed been writing for Ethel Merman just before the two of them teamed up for this show in 1934.
Gemma Craven desperately lacks the raucous energy for Reno Sweeney, one of Merman's great golden-foghorn roles, Jonathon Morris looks about as embarrassed in the male lead as we are watching him play it, and it is left to Billy Boyle to try ineffectively to raise a few laughs in true pantomime style; I half expected him to divide the audience in half and have them sing alternate verses in competition from a stage songsheet.
We were spared that, but little else; if this is the standard of road-show musicals at the start of the 21st century, it is hardly surprising that most local audiences now save up for a trip to London. Andrew O'Connor as director and Adrian Allsopp as choreographer seem to be in a weird kind of contest to see who can do the most damage to the show; what Cole Porter ever did to them, that they feel obliged to extract this ghastly and ghostly revenge, remains unclear.
With Andrew Lloyd Webber about to preview an entire Bollywood musical, and the promise of Far Pavilions on stage next year, it can't be long before we get A Passage to India as a full-scale singalong. In the meantime, to the National from the Binningham Rep comes The Ramayana, a 2,500year-old Sanskrit legend made flesh by Peter Oswald.
In my uncharitable experience, if something has lain around for more than 2,000 years without being staged locally there is usually quite a good reason, and sure enough the reason here is that it's largely rubbish in saris or monkey-suits or (for the hero at least) gallons of blue body-paint. We are, doubtless, supposed to be respectful toward the multicultural, politically correct work being done here. And Trevor Nunn, having just announced that he will depart the National when his contract ends next year, probably also scores Arts Council (if it still exists) bonus points by bringing this production to London from the Midlands, though if it and Singin' in the Rain really represent the only major regional productions considered this year to be worthy of a place on the South Bank then the provincial British theatre is in even more trouble than I thought. Maybe someone from the National's intake office would like to try with a map to find the Glasgow Citizens or the Watermill at Newbury for starters.
Because his new play kicks off an interesting exchange system between our two leading theatres-in-the-round, Alan Ayckbourn's at Scarborough and Sam Walters's at the Richmond Orange Tree, it is I guess inevitable that Torben Betts should find himself compared to late-period Ayckbourn. But he comes of an older and still darker tradition, that of Greek tragedy remade for a modern audience; the family he writes of here is in fact so violently dysfunctional as to make even the bleakest of Ayckbourn's look positively cosy.
It is doubtless insulting to describe a writer with nearly a dozen produced plays under his belt as promising, but there is something about Clockwatching that still suggests work in progress. Sam Walters's characteristically careful, thoughtful and edgy production cannot entirely disguise the fact that rather too much seems to happen offstage, and that scenes are inclined to drift along a little too slowly before running up against sudden moments of blood and brutality.
An unusual porch, and the impossibility of a full staircase at the Orange Tree, also gives Pip Leckenby's set the curious feeling that we might be in a bungalow of the Deep South rather than a house in some unnamed North of England town. But these are, in the end, minor quibbles about a major playwriting discovery. Betts and Walters are wonderfully served by Frank Mooney as the old father, bringing with him on stage yet other odd echoes of D.H. Lawrence and David Storey, while Steven Elder and Jason Baughan are wonderfully ill-assorted as warring brothers-in-law.
Talking of Trevor Nunn's newly announced departure from the National next year, the names being most often kicked around this week as his successors are those of Sam Mendes and Nick Hytner, neither of whom, having recently discovered Hollywood fame and fortune, is likely to want to spend several years behind a desk in Waterloo. Two more promising and realistic names are oddly absent: Michael Attenborough has been the number two at Stratford for almost a decade and is well qualified, as is the aforementioned Ed Hall. Both are sons of distinguished director/producers, and have grown up in the theatre from early childhood. I would back either against any of the other likely starters; but then again, as I am too often reminded. I have always been personally prejudiced in favour of second-generation theatrical survivors.
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