All in Good Time
This is not to disparage, for Maggie is a remark- able achievement It scores on almost every count: on the book, on the lyrics and music, on the sets and on the performances. Only the choreography is weakish, and even here there is one sparkling exception in the dance at the Catacomb Club that opens the second act.
All these things are totally integrated into the whole. Sean Kenny's sets enable the actors to use the stage's great height as well as its length and breadth. Thus the hero Casey and the whore-heroine Maggie can play one of their best scenes way up on the top deck of the New Brighton Ferry and the effect of distance and [Continued on page 440
separation from the others is doubled. The songs are ideally fitted to their singers. The Big Fellow, Willie Morgan, the old-style union leader who has done well for himself as well as for his union, comes back from Rome and into the pub to buy drinks all round—a sign of his power as much of his generosity. He is a large, vain man with whitening hair, double-breasted suit and an unsympathetic whore on his arm. (Not all whores have hearts of gold, even in Liver- pool.) The dockers distrust him but are still dependent on him. He sings the lilting `Away from Home,' which is quite unlike any other music in the show and the company join in. For a moment the dockers' uncertain attitude towards him and his uneasy, watchful hold over them are caught perfectly. And this ambivalence is caught again amid the swinging lights of the New Brighton Fairground. 'The World's a Lovely Place,' bawl the company with only Maggie May singing against them. The world of the fair- ground, or the world? Is it irony or not? There's another song much 'closer to Kurt Weill music- ally, but this one has the full Well spirit.
Yet the strongest point of all is the character- isation. Alun Owen has the estimable quality of seeming to put a biography into a single line and he has the help of some splendid faces. He will drop in a line that the audience will wrongly take as a feeble old joke. 'Don't turn your back on Casey, he's been in the navy,' ceased to be funny years ago, if it ever was. The line's there because it's right. Like so many others it sets an atmosphere and establishes an identity at once. And having set the background the larger characters emerge more distinctly. There are at least five of them and the best of them all are Andrew Keir's Willie Morgan and Diana Quiseekay's Maureen O'Neill. Maureen is Maggie's mate and Miss Quiseekay is a genuine discovery.
MALCOLM RUTHERFORD
Previous page
