Theatre
Goliath (Bush) Kiss Me Kate (Open Air, Regent's Park)
Revolting Nineties
Sheridan Morley
Athe Bush, Goliath is a hugely impressive solo 90 minutes by Nichola McAuliffe in which she plays 19 characters from policemen to pensioners, all of whom were caught up in the summer riots of 1991 on housing estates across the country. In the United States, Anna Devere Smith has, of course, for several years been doing these riot solos, but now for the first time we get the specifically British experience of Cardiff, Tyneside and Oxford filtered through the writing of Bryony Lavery from the original book by Beatrix Campbell, and a devastating experience it is.
What connected and was curious about these riots is that they were not essentially racial or class-based or even economic in the narrow sense; what happened, towards the end of a long hot summer, was that gangs of mainly very young men from the worst of the council estates in inner cities took to stealing, racing and then crashing cars into store windows, not necessarily to loot but simply to express a frustration with their own lives and surroundings so deeply felt that even the destruction of their own environment seemed better than having to continue living within it. This was a revolt against ThatcHer's Britain, but it never got organised on any kind of national basis; sporadic outbreaks of violence ended as rapidly and mysteriously as they had start- ed, leaving police and social workers and politicians alike to pick their way through the rubble and wonder if it could happen again.
As well they might; for nothing in these intervening six years has really improved that much, even if one or two of the worst high-rise blocks of the 1960s have merciful- ly been destroyed. McAuliffe is married to a distinguished crime reporter, and the research that she and her writers have done these last few months is hugely impressive; Goliath reaches no real conclusion, but it lets us into the sense and sound of a bleak world, almost an alternative universe in which the dispossessed of our nation try to come to terms with their own despair. For most of them there is still no exit, which is perhaps why death at 150 miles an hour while pursued by police cars seems almost attractive when compared to a life with no prospects of any kind.
There are no heroes here, and no villains either; just a lot of very angry and unhappy people on both sides of the law trying to make some sense out of an impossible situ- ation; if these summer riots ever recur, at least we now have a reliable route map to guide us around their no-hope neighbour- hoods. Goliath is the must-see solo of the summer.
Insofar as there has ever been any such thing as the perfect Broadway musical, that thing is probably Kiss Me Kate. Written almost 50 years ago by Cole Porter at an unusually low ebb in his career, when he was just coming off the relative failures of The Pirate on film and Around the World in 80 Days on stage, this is perhaps the only classic score ever to have been suggested by a stage manager, one Saint Subber who was working on a long tour of The Taming of the Shrew with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne when their constant backstage bickering inspired in him the thought that there might be something very funny in a show about two married (or in this case newly divorced) stars carrying their dress- ing-room battles onstage with them.
There have, of course, been other great Shakespearean musicals, from West Side Story all the way back to The Boys from Syracuse, but none which has ever managed as well as this one to keep both the old and new plots in such perfect harmony; at least half a dozen of the numbers have titles drawn directly from the original text and the book by Sam and Bella Spewack is also unique in the way that it guts and updates the original, but keeps the Shakespearean line flowing right through to Kate's capitu- lation. Here, too, the musical often wins out over the play; where Kate, on her knees to a wife-beater at the close, now creates a real problem for politically cor- rect directors, somehow in the mayhem of a backstage singalong the difficulty just never arises, or if it does the orchestra soon drowns it out.
Ian Talbot's new production for his Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park got off to a difficult and rain-soaked start over the weekend, but when the stage did dry out sufficiently to allow some spectacular tap- dancing, it became clear that this is a truly vintage revival, arguably the best ever seen in the Park's relatively new series of sum- mertime musicals.
Andrew C. Wadsworth is a fiery if slen- der Petruchio, Louise Gold is a wonderful- ly feisty Kate, Gavin Muir and Rob Edwards manage a definitive 'Brush Up Your Shakespeare' duet, but in the end the one to watch is, as usual, Issy van Rand- wyck, a gloriously eccentric Dutch cabaret entertainer who now makes the crossover to real theatre without losing any of the anarchic talent which is, I firmly believe, going to make her a legendary star in the rare, bizarre tradition of Carol Charming and Hermione Gingold.
There is a general and splendid confi- dence here from the entire company, not always apparent in earlier musical revivals in the Park, as though they each know that all they have to do is sing the songs and play the scenes and leave the rest in the safe hands of Old King Cole. Lisa Kent's choreography is just dazzling in both its poetry and its parody, and Talbot's produc- tion is a hugely efficient celebration of the sheer artistry of the Broadway musical at its immediately post-war zenith.
Kiss Me Kate broke no new ground in musicals and has no successors; what makes it special is the way that Porter inte- grated every song in his score, so that none can be moved around and only a few work as well out of the context of the show; it was in some ways his salute to another great stage manager, Shakespeare himself, as well as a kind of summary of exactly where the Broadway musical stood in 1948. It was precisely because it could go no fur- ther in this particular direction that the new era of Rodgers and Hammerstein had just opened with Oklahoma! and Carousel; with Kiss Me Kate, the old pre-war master was effectively taking his leave on an all- time high, bequeathing his successors an awful lot to live up to.
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