Theatre
The Sound of Music (Sadler's Wells)
Romeo and Juliet (Barbican)
What larks
Sheridan Morley
In the title song from a Broadway musi- cal of 1959 which became one of the most commercially successful movies ever made, a postulant nun (later to become Maria von Trapp of the Trapp Family Singers) tells us that she wishes to sing through the night, 'like a lark who is learning to pray'. I have long worried about this. Is there, unknown to most bird-watchers, some kind of lark seminary where feathered creatures flap around in training for the priesthood? Could we be about to witness the landing of the first lark Pope?
Other lyrics in The Sound of Music are equally disconcerting: 'Edelweiss,' sings the heroic anti-Nazi Captain von Trapp, later still more heroically to take the ex-nun and seven children on world concert tours, `every morning you greet me.' Austria in 1938 seems to have had a lot more to worry about than the Nazi Anschluss: talking flowers and bird-priests and singing nuns, not to mention a Mother Abbess obsessed with the need to climb every mountain, presumably in order to escape the praying birds and the talking flowers.
And another thing: in what Rodgers and Hammerstein musical does a governess arrive, at a particularly unhappy turning- point in her life, to take charge of several winsome and lovable children parented by a tyrannical and obsessive father-figure `We must be in French territorial waters' who eventually falls in love with the gov- erness? Well, yes, The Sound of Music. Or, as it is also known, The King and I.
Rodgers and Hammerstein clearly had a thing about nannies and fathers and chil- dren second only to that of J.M. Barrie: but, as Wendy Toye's new touring revival of The Sound of Music at Sadler's Wells admirably demonstrates, the old Broadway hitmen knew exactly what they were doing. The damn thing still runs like clockwork. At the time of writing, Hammerstein was already a dying man and there is no doubt that his lyrics here lack the dark, driving political edge of some of those in South Pacific or the lesser-known Allegro. But in the end the sheer gala, Gothic inanity of a plot which vaguely suggests that the Trapps escaped the Nazi invaders by singing them into somnolence has a charm all of its own. Ronald Lee's production commendably lacks the cardboard inadequacies of the last Petula Clark revival, and Liz Robert- son makes a scrawny girl guide of a Maria, while Christopher Cazenove invests the Captain with unusual dignity even when required to report on the singing flowers.
After a disastrous start last September at Stratford, David Leveaux's RSC produc- tion of Romeo and Juliet comes into the Barbican with 40 minutes mercifully shaved off its running time and a considerably changed cast. One central problem still remains, however, which is that its title players (Michael Maloney and Clare Hol- man) look as though they should be worry- ing about their children's school fees rather than their own teenage romantic obses- sions. They are a distinctly mature Romeo and Juliet, and the youthful excesses of the plot therefore seem still more daft than usual. Nor is there any real evidence that Leveaux or anyone involved has anything very much to tell us about the play, except that it needs every now and then to turn up in the RSC repertoire. At the opening, against Alison Chitty's magnificently pan- elled quattrocento setting, the entire cast look as though they were hoping for West Side Story: the minor street skirmishes specified by Shakespeare become inner-city battles with thunder and lightning on the sound-track.
There are a lot of athletics here, but curi- ously little passion: it takes only Denys Hawthorne as the Chorus, in full melodic flood, to remind us elsewhere of how thin are the ranks of RSC character actors and how uncertain their command of the verse. Long gone are the Stratford days when players like Cyril Luckham and Anthony Nicholls would regularly make of the Mon- tagues and the Capulets strong family por- traits, and therefore some sense of the play's parental battles. Here only Sheila Reid as the Scots Nurse and Tim Mein- nerny as a psychopathic Mercutio, achieve any really memorable characterisation, and the moment one best remembers of the entire production has nothing to do with either Romeo or Juliet. Rather is it the moment when Mercutio, stabbed and dying, realises with a sick laugh that none of his apparent friends has even bothered to notice that he is in mortal peril.
Leveaux has one other intelligent notion, which is to have Juliet float through the opening of the Mantua scene like some sort of premature ghost, hovering over Romeo's arrival there as if to warn him of the fatal failure of communication that is about to occur. For the rest, the elements of waking dreams and hot-city nightmares are only occasionally brought together into a coherent statement of what this play might be about, or why we need to keep having another look at it. There is still a style crisis within the new RSC administra- tion, and it shows up most clearly in the most familiar texts.
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