Losing the plot
Lloyd Evans
Mercy Soho Snoopy! The Musical New Players
Lights out at the Soho Theatre. Mercy, Lin Coghlan's new play, opens in obscurity, gropes towards darkness, stumbles into the shadows and is gobbled up by a black hole. Five Cockney foster-waifs have been let loose on a sodden wasteland. They blunder about, unsupervised and foodless, fighting each other, swearing prolifically and trying to find their way home. But London has been engulfed by an apocalypse whose source is never fully explained.
Floods, tornadoes and pollution seemed the leading candidates, but there were other disasters thickening the brew. Two of the kids had been mysteriously beaten up. One had been betrayed, kidnapped and then released (I think). Others bled at the nose and/or had been involved in car crashes. A constant pitter-pattering soundtrack lent substance to the motif, mentioned several times, that a poisonous 'white rain' was falling from invisible skies. White rain? The cast remained dry throughout, their faces and clothes unblemished by hail, sleet, whitewash, Oil of Olay, acne cream or any other form of heavenly precipitation.
But the catastrophe became even more elaborate. A nuclear strike was expected, or had possibly already occurred, `Osama's soldiers' were poised to invade and ... enough, enough. One cause is plenty. Two puzzle. Three bore. Six and seven carry the show into la-la land. And for characters like these scarred orphans, life is pretty tough as it is without throwing the Book of Revelation at them. There was more. The kids kept stumbling across weird objects — a hamper of rum, a live chicken, a stash of videos, a social worker, a rowing boat, a dying woman impaled on an iron bar. It was like The Generation Game. Each discovery deepened the impression that the
writer had lost faith in the traditional simplicities of storytelling.
To her credit, she has mastered the rhythms and phraseology of London's victim classes. The urchins have nothing to say and they say it at great length in their graceless, staccato jabber. But there's no need to go to a theatre to hear this. Get on a bus.
After a bungled escape drama, what better than genuine escapism? Snoopy! The Musical is the opening show at the refurbished New Players Theatre under the arches at Charing Cross. This is a dazzlingly energetic and good-humoured production and only an exceptionally heartless and embittered reviewer would criticise it, so here goes.
What makes a good musical? Emotion, melodrama, heightened sentimentality; the richer its coating of sugar the better. But there's no emotion here at all. Charlie Brown and his chums exist in a bubble of innocence which real feelings can never invade or spoil. The wholesome eggheads appeal to the shallowest part of one's psyche, the bit that enjoys watching kittens at play.
The dialogue, lifted directly from the original cartoons, putters away with ineffective sweetness. Exchanges that may amuse a jaded commuter at the bottom of his newspaper won't satisfy the demands of a West End audience. Nor is there any trace of a story, just a medley of song-anddance numbers enacted with bundles of fizz and energy.
Robin Armstrong as Snoopy carries the show with an infectious sense of fun, and Alex Woodhall has a good time as Woodstock. Everyone else is OK. Genial balderdash would be my estimate, but perhaps I'm being unfair. In the crush-bar I heard the svelte larynx of a former MP deliver this sinewy epigram. 'Even when it's not very good, it's very good,' enthused Gyles Brandreth, the Voltaire of the Home Counties.
One cannot rely infallibly on a sliver of whetted approbation tossed forth in the charged atmosphere of a press night, but I sincerely hope the show succeeds because there's another, more interesting, storyline here. The bright little buttons playing Charlie Brown (Steven Kynman) and Linus van Pelt (Stuart Piper) are also the producers of the show. Last year it ran for a few weeks at the Jermyn Street Theatre and every seat was sold. And OK, the Jermyn Street Theatre has the capacity of a park bench, but a sell-out is a sell-out, Building on this success, the tearaway twins have canvassed money on both sides of the Atlantic to fund this transfer. The show's creator, Arthur Whitelaw, was persuaded to fly in from America to direct the new production. The boys are just 22. If I were a canny actor, I'd go straight to the New Players Theatre and bombard the dressing-room with bouquets and superlatives. Cameron Mackintosh and Andrew Lloyd Webber were 22 once.
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