Theatre
Mutiny (Piccadilly) Me and My Girl (Adelphi)
Destiny (Half Moon)
The sound of music
Christopher Edwards
Isometimes ask myself if Spectator read- ers might be more interested in musicals. Unfortunately I am a particularly unsym- pathetic member of the audience on these occasions, and I never last long. Dulling On Your Toes and 42nd Street I was at the fire exit within 15 minutes, and it was only an overwhelming numbness of the whole body that kept me in my seat until the interval a Melvyn Bragg's A Hired Man. When asked for my views by an undergraduate maga- zine I confessed that I rather loathed hve musicals, adding whimsically that I could only bear films of the big American ones, and then only on the television after Christmas dinner. My attitude was de- scribed, solemnly, as 'disturbing'. Most of the time the amazing energy of the perfor" mers, the high kicking, the fabulous cos- tumes, the light shows — all the imported elements of razzmatazz — come over as just a disguise for thin characterisation, feeble tunes and second-rate singing. The, only exciting development I have notice° in recent musicals is the rediscovery °f tap-dancing, which is something I am sure most people would secretly like to be able to do well.
It was not, however, out of a simPie sense of duty, to what might be an imagth- ary readership, that I went to see Mur/q. As I have more than a passing interest 10 matters maritime I wanted to see how the designer, the brilliant William DudleY, would handle all the sea business that such a story must have. There must, I felt, be a. t least one huge storm in which Captain Bligh would stagger about the rolling dock roaring instructions about topsails, 1°d lowed perhaps by that wonderful al'. u / sacrificial command that the best captauls in the best stories give to their crew at the height of a crisis: 'Lash me to the mast! I wasn't disappointed. This was exactly vthat Frank Finlay's Bligh did say as the Bowl rounded the Horn. What is more, Dudley 5, set of the ship is quite remarkable ana deserves acclaim in its own right. After all introductory song the floor of the stage splits, and, by the use of hydraulic lifts, iii Bounty rises up into view. I have seen many dock scenes in the theatre but this one is exceptional, not just because of Precise details of mast, sail etc, but because the whole tiny vessel actually appears as if Perched perilously on top of an ocean wave, and the sheer drops of some 30 feet all around her are real. During the storm she pitches and rolls, and as the agile all-singing, all-dancing crew scramble up and down the rigging you actually do fear that they might plunge to their deaths below.
The thrill of the set is considerable and offers great diversion for about half the evening, but the music and story are utterly unmemorable. David Essex is responsible for the composition, and he also acts the Part of Fletcher Christian, a factor which aPPears to have guaranteed massive ad- vance bookings and so made the show _entic-proof. In the Essex version of history bligh becomes a wicked representative of the repressive Ancien Regime while Fletcher catches the spirit of the French Revolution and turns into a liberal demo- crat, crooning about the Freedom of Man arid his wish to return to a state of innocence. At Tahiti on come the dancing maidens, dusky, bare-breasted, gyrating at he hips and singing their traditional island 19ve songs of rhythm and perpetual mo- tion. There is also a rather confusing War Dance in which the warriors simultaneous- 13' rattle their spears and quake at the Ifflees. If you are interested in ships and "an. cing girls, my advice would be to pay a quick visit at someone else's expense and to leave for dinner at the interval. The revival of the 1937 hit musical Me and My Girl has been on at the Adelphi for months and the only reason I went to see it Was because several friends insisted that it Was the best musical they had ever seen anYwhere in the whole world. It will certainly be better, they said, than Mutiny. ROW right they were. It is an excellent Show, both elegantly and slickly produced with a good plot and rounded characters. irlh.e Story hangs on the search for the lost elf- to an ancient English dukedom who turns out to be a cockney sparrow living in sOuth London. Will he or won't he aban- (fon his former love Sally Smith, marry into the aristocracy and become a nob? The Show has a perfect balance of sentimental- ftY and broad humour plus several good class jokes that made me laugh out loud, and it is performed with a charm and enthusiasm that is infectious. The cast obviously enjoy it as much as the audience. ost importantly, the songs are witty melodic and memorable, including of Curse the most famous one of all, 'The :ambeth Walk'. The present cast, led by !Ile talented Robert Lindsay as the cockney like, seem to me to be at their peak, and K) if you are inclined to this sort of entertainment I would recommend an ear- ly visit. It is the only live musical I have ever enjoyed. Npe. sfinY, David Edgar's play about the tonal Front, was written and first per- rifled in the mid-Seventies. It is a clever and at times perceptive piece about the British and attempts to plot the rise of a certain sort of national disillusion from the granting of Independence to India in 1947 through to a by-election in the last Heath administration. In a programme note Edgar expresses his belief that its revival is timely: 'The signs that Thatcherism is beginning its slow crumble are crowding the horizon — and with them the risk of a resurgence of the ultra-Right.' Perhaps the true test of his belief about the resurgence of the ultra-Right may actually prove to be musical. His play contains an extended rendering (in English) of the Horst Wessel Lied and we will all have to wait to see how many members of the audience start to nod their heads rhythmically from side to side, tap their feet in time and call, perhaps, for an encore.
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