Theatre
Stairway to Heaven (King's Head) Out of the Blue (Shaftesbury) My Night with Reg (Criterion) Not About Heroes (Jermyn Street Theatre)
Period pieces
Sheridan Morley
Two new musicals this week of wildly different aspect and intention, but only going to prove that small is beautiful and big can be horrendous. At the King's Head, Stairway to Heaven is a mini-staging of A Matter of Life and Death, the old Powell- Pressburger movie classic from 1945 in which David Niven went on trial for his life after a heavenly angel had somehow failed to scoop him up from a wartime crash. The film was an often unwieldy debate about the afterlife and the relative merits of love and living, but from its two young com- posers, Morgan and Metchear, have with their director Dan Crawford crafted a small-scale musical of tremendous period charm, complete with new songs all of which sound as though they were written 50 years ago. At least two of these num- bers, 'Everyone's A Fool in Love' and 'What Keeps Dreamers Awake', make one ache for the cast recording, but most importantly the show keeps the King's Head flag flying for the kind of musicals we are always told they don't write like that any more.
Out of the Blue (Shaftesbury) is also set in 1945, but that is the only link: not so much Miss Saigon as Miss Shogun, this one is a breathtakingly bizarre singalong about the emotional and clinical fall-out of the Nagasaki atomic bomb. With casting not so much non-traditional as nonsensical, so that a black actress plays the daughter of a Japanese nurse and a white American doc- tor, songs which never quite seem to get to their main melody, and a deadly solemnity about the lyrics (The wailing dead of Tokyo-heroic, stoic, manic') it is hard to understand how Out of the Blue ever got to a first read-through, let alone a first night. It will soon I fear be Into the Red, a terrible warning to anyone who believes that Boubil/Schonberg shows are easy to echo even when you haven't got a halfway ade- quate storyline.
Kevin Elyot's My Night With Reg (Criteri- on) is essentially a London La Ronde for the gay 90s: six men, linked only by their homosexuality and friendship with the title character, whom we never get to meet because he dies early in the play, come together to regroup in a series of alliances mostly doomed from the outset. For Schnitzler, of course, the unseen connec- tion was venereal disease as the sexual roundabout turned on its inexorable axis: for Elyot a century later it is Aids, which claims two of his men. Two others break up, and the final pair are left on stage as the lights go down trying, haltingly, to form yet another coupling.
But this is, amazingly, a comedy and one which has just rightly won the Standard award as the best of its year: against a bleak background, not unlike the funeral scene in Four Weddings and a Funeral, Elyot has managed to find warmth and laughter and even hope for a future in which it may just about be possible not to die of love. He is wonderfully served by a director, Roger Mitchell, and a cast led by John Sessions and David Bamber, all of whom have realised that the trick here is to underplay, understate and generally never raise the conversation level above that of the average Hampstead dinner party. Each of Elyot's characters is to some extent stereotypical, from a prissy young queen to a bit of the rough, but his achievement has been to give them a life and a reality which adds up to a remarkably accurate and touching picture of the semi-closeted gay life at a time when it is still under dire threat. In its clenched, brittle way, the 90 unbroken minutes of Reg will tell you more about what it is like to be alive and gay at the end of this century than all seven hours of the apocalyptic Angels in America.
At the newly-fitted Jermyn Street The- atre, a welcome revival of Stephen Mac- donald's Not About Heroes, the play about Wilfrid Owen and Siegfried Sassoon at the first world war and derived from their own poetry and letters of the period. Essentially a Journey's End set back from the trenches, it remains a clenched and ineffably English love story about two men who could never quite face up to their own passion or the death that was to claim Owen just a week before the Armistice. In Nick Ellsworth's production, Basil Hoskins is wonderfully touching, though the age-gap here to Adam Warren's Owen seems a little too wide.
Previous page
