Theatre
Hot Stuff (Cambridge) The Cenci (Lyric Hammersmith Studio)
Schlocky horror show
Sheridan Morley
Those of you who were with me last week may recall that I am not hugely in favour of the rock musicals cluttering up the West End in these dog days of summer. But if there is anything worse than an old rock musical it is a new rock musical, and sure enough we also now have one of those at the Cambridge. Billed as 'a musical trib- ute to the hip and funky Seventies', Hot Rock turns out to be a mind-bendingly naff, shlocky horror show which has taken two years to reach London from Leicester and should have taken several more decades.
The plot here, such as it isn't, concerns a young nerd call Joe Soap who sells his soul to the devil in a Faustian pact to become the biggest rock star in the world. Mephistopheles is therefore reincarnated as Mavis de Follies, an artist's agent, and we go rapidly to the devil from there. At times Paul Kerryson, as director/deviser, seems to be intent on parodying the rock stars of 20 years ago, and the high spot of the show is indeed a wonderfully bad-taste mockery of the blind Peters and Lee. At other times he seems vaguely interested in an update of the Faust legend, but mainly he appears to be just interested in having a lot of derelict old pop hits sung very loudly by a cast all of whom seem to have had tal- ent and charisma bypasses early in rehearsal. In a production on which every conceivable expense has been spared, a few tacky old press cuttings are projected on to a screen to remind us of random Seventies happenings largely concerned with John Lennon; but as the Beatles spent most of this decade in litigation, the music has had to be drawn from other sources.
The main achievement of Hot Stuff is to remind us of what an appalling decade the Seventies was for popular music, except perhaps on Broadway: Mr Kerryson is a distinguished Sondheim director and would be wise to go back to him.
It is a curious indictment of both the National Theatre and the Royal Shake- speare Company that neither has ever dared go near Shelley's The Cenci. Reck- oned by many the finest tragedy written in the hundred years from 1790, it was his only completed stage play and has about it echoes both of classical Greek tragedy and of Shakespearian verse. In short, it is pre- cisely the kind of work that subsidised com- panies were created to perform.
Instead, it has been left to a fringe group, the Damned Poets Theatre Company, to bring The Cenci back to London, at the Lyric Hammersmith Studio, for its first professional production here in more than 30 years. This is a complex and tricky trag- edy to stage, for precisely which reason it could benefit from rather more technical and artistic resources than are available here. What is extraordinary is that in his late twenties, only three years before his death, Shelley, with no real dramatic expe- rience except in his private life, was able to achieve something on this Shakespearian scale: the tale of the evil Count Francesco Cenci, a real-life nobleman of the 16th cen- tury, whose cruelty is so monumental that finally his daughter Beatrice rebels.
When, after her father has killed her two brothers and held a banquet to celebrate the murders, the Pope refuses to intervene, Beatrice takes the matter into her own hands, arranging With considerable difficul- ty and at least one false start to have her father assassinated. Brought to trial with her mother and brothers, she behaves in court like an amalgam of Portia and Isabel- la, roundly chastising an archaic and male- oriented society which has stood behind her savage father because of his establish- ment credentials, blinding itself to his read- ily apparent evil.
The play, originally banned for almost a century, first came into its own during the 1920s when Sybil Thorndike made it very much her own: indeed, it was at a perfor- mance of The Cenci that Bernard Shaw said, 'I have found my St Joan'. The role is a tough one, since Beatrice only really comes into her own during the final trial scene and is, unlike Portia, not given much of a life outside it: but working in Sydnee Blake's fine production, Louise Bangay has much of the fire of triumphant moral inno- cence against the mafioso Count of Craig Finder.
Elsewhere in the cast two actors' sons, Jason Morel! and Andrew Hawkins, are powerful in revenge and treachery respec- tively, while on an evidently limited budget a real and brave attempt has been made to bring back a play for too long lost to the classroom and the history books. The fire that drives The Cenci is the fire of Shelley's moral indignation at a corrupt, conserva- tive world, and it still burns very brightly indeed.
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