Theatre
Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (Barbican)
Tommy (Shaftesbury) The King of Prussia (Donmar Warehouse)
Limited action
Sheridan Morley
Frank McGuinness's Observe the Sons of Ulster is in a new RSC touring produc- tion briefly at the Barbican; only eight years after its London premiere at Hamp- stead, the revival was sadly conceived to celebrate the all-too-short IRA ceasefire.
Like Sebastian Barry's award-winning Steward of Christendom, this too is a memo- ry play digging deep into the Irish past in an effort to explain its present; but where Sebastian Barry takes us back to the Trou- bles, McGuinness goes a few years further back still, to the Flanders battle of the first world war. In that sense, what we have here is the Irish Journey's End; eight soldiers, all of them ghosts, come to their only surviving comrade, now himself dying, to take us through the agonies of the first war as it affected the Irish, whose Ulster Protestants offered themselves like lambs to the slaughter in a war which technically was not theirs to fight. Through their overlap- ping, sometimes contradictory memories an awful beauty is born: the beauty of McGuinness's bleak poetry, reminiscent sometimes of Eliot or Christopher Fry, which takes the place of action ends up by giving us what is often more of a poem or novel than a play. The action is strictly limited, and though these sons of Ulster are afraid, it is not just of the war: they fear for their homeland and buried deep somewhere here are the seeds for the conflict of these last 20 years. Even within the often chaotic history of stage musicals, The Who's Tommy (now in its London premiere at the Shaftesbury) has an eccentric past. Written 25 years ago by Pete Townshend, it has been a record album, a rock-opera concert, a Ken Russell film; it was also the first pop music ever heard at the Metropolitan in New York, and picked up five Tony Awards when it finally hit Broadway a couple of years ago.
So now that we finally get to see it in London, what is it? Essentially still a rock- opera in the tradition of such contempo- raries as Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar. But where they both enjoyed plots of a kind, and some sort of dramatic force in book and lyrics, Tommy stubbornly refuses to make any real concessions to Shaftes- bury Avenue musical traditions.
True, it has a couple of great songs in `Pinball Wizard' and 'See Me Touch Me', but the plot such as it is remains often unfathomable, and the Broadway director Des McAnuff seems to have decided that the more the show resembles the Planetari- um, with lights darting all around the stage and overhead, the less we'll be aware of the great hole in the heart that lies at the cen- tre of Tommy.
The real problem is that there's nobody here we much care about, least of all the title character who goes deaf and dumb and blind on seeing his father kill his moth- er's lover and then is miraculously restored by his addiction to pinball machines. One of these explodes in a neat metaphor for the second half of the show itself, especially after the interval when not a lot happens , several times.
Kim Wilde as the mother and Paul Keat- ing as the adult Tommy do their dramatic best to clamber over the gaps in the narra- tive and make out we have a halfway coher- ent show here, but the rest of the cast look as though they'd have been happier sup- porting the original Who for a gig at Wem- bley Stadium.
As the Donmar Warehouse sends its tri- umphant Company into the West End and celebrates its survival grant, they are play- ing host to an ambitious short season of new writing from all over Britain, starting with The King of Prussia, Nick Darke's 18th-century romp about pirates at the time of George III and the French Revolu- tion. The Kneehigh Theatre company are, it has to be said, not yet up to London stan- dards but they have a boisterous near-ama- teur energy and enthusiasm for the project which finally wins over even metropolitan hearts. Yet much of the acting would prob- ably play better in a Cornish pub theatre where the local references would make rather more sense to those of us not exactly versed in pirate law of two centuries ago. This week the season moves on to new plays from Scotland, Ireland and Wales, each playing for only six nights; it would be arrogant to suggest on the evidence of only The King of Prussia that in the regional the- atre there is more enthusiasm than exper- tise, but that is certainly the evidence of this opening show.
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