Theatre
Five Guys Named Moe (Stratford East) Mein Kampf: Farce (Riverside)
Good fun and bad satire
Christopher Edwards
The purpose behind Clarke Peters' musical is to celebrate the 1940s song- writer Louis Jordan. This it succeeds in doing beyond any producer's wildest dreams. The curtain goes up on the de- jected hero Nomax (Dig Wayne). Nomax has a bad case of the blues. His woman has left him and all he has for company is a bottle and the radio. But help is at hand. In a puff of smoke five men, all called Moe, appear to sort him out. What follows is an evening of exuberant music-making and dance.
Louis Jordan was a saxophonist and leader of a band. Probably the only piece by him that most people have heard of, courtesy of a telly advert for a credit card, is 'Is You Is Or Is You Ain't'. How his work has been overlooked for the stage is hard to comprehend. All his numbers have lyrics worth listening to. Some are witty pieces of advice to men on how to handle awkward women, and vice versa. There is even a hymn in praise of fat women which is very funny. Others lament how cruel life can be. They all have shape and a moral point. All of them end up celebrating life, or at least urging you to make the most of it. And the music is alive to the nuances of blues rhythms and lends itself perfectly to Charles Augins' slick choregraphy. The performers — Clarke Peters himself, Ken- ny Andrews, Paul Medford, Peter Newton and Omar Oai are all accomplished and engaging both as solosists and in a chorus. This is an evening of infectious fun.
You cannot say the same for George Tabori's play about Hitler whchi he sets in a Viennese doss house. Tabori carries on where Brecht left off in Arturo Ui; Hitler is portrayed as an absurd, petit-bourgeois figure. We see him at the barbers where his luxurious moustache is given it's famous toothbrush shape by a Jewish attendant called Schlomo (Joseph Long). Schlomo also gives the young Adolf some career advice; he suggests he enters politics. As examples of black Jewish humour these jokes hit us with the right note of uneasi- ness. In the early scenes (and indeed in most of the others) Jonathan Oliver plays Hitler as a hyper-kinetic megalomaniac who rushes about in frenzied athletic mo- tion. Occasionally this releases genuinely puncturing satirical laughter from the audi- ence. But this is hardly adequate to deal with such an historically significant subject.
As if to provide balance and perspective the playwright introduces the figure of Death (Josephine Welcome) who material- ises before Hitler as a chain-smoking vamp in black lace. But even with this new symbolic presence, the play fails to gain coherance. Death frightens the virginal Fiihrer, who rushes off to hide in the lavatory. Scoring laughs off Hitler and making him come over as a frightened, emotionally inadequate wimp may satisfy some sort of desire for revenge. What it fails to do is to provide us with any sort of dramatically fulfilling encounter.
`Monet! 1 thought it was Gatwick!'
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