History Boys might be taught a lesson from the previous, writes GEORGINA BROWN
The History Boys (Theatre Royal Bath and touring)
Verdict: Could try harder
A Night With Janis Joplin: The Musical (Peacock Theatre, London)
Verdict: A little piece of Janis’s heart
History has a tendency to repeat itself. Though less so on the stage, where each revival of an old play proves what a difference a director and actors make.
It’s 20 years since Alan Bennett’s The History Boys premiered at the National Theatre and Nicholas Hytner’s high-spirited, hilarious staging made stars of a new generation of youngsters: James Corden, Dominic Cooper, Russell Tovey, Samuel Barnett and Jamie Parker, playing a bunch of bright sixth-formers.
A class act which explored education with dazzle as well as depth, it scooped dozens of awards.
While Bennett’s wit is unsinkable, Sean Linnen’s underpowered production fails to find the pace and comic timing which made it such a rich and rewarding hymn to the joys of youth — and of life’s infinite possibilities — that it was voted the nation’s favourite play.
Set in the Eighties at a boys grammar school somewhere up north, a handful of the brightest are preparing for their Oxbridge entrance exam.
Boy trouble: Simon Rouse and Lewis Cornay with Tashinga Bepete (centre) as Crowther
Lewis Cornay (left) as Posner and Curtis Kemlo (right) as Lockwood
‘Think charm. Think polish. Think Renaissance man,’ says Milo Twomey’s dreary headmaster, too much of a stranger to all three ideas, like this show.
He appoints a results-driven young Mr Irwin (unprepossessing Bill Milner) to teach them how to turn a question on its head and find a flashy, flip ‘gobbet’ to support a slick argument.
To the contempt of the older, maverick Mr Hector, more concerned with educating the lads for life — and with whom Bennett’s sympathies evidently lie.
Alas, Simon Rouse’s Hector lacks the charisma necessary to explain why his boys willingly submit to having their heads filled with the poetry of Auden, Larkin, Hardy and Shakespeare (learned ‘by heart’, by which he means with real love rather than by rote) and why the prettier pupils put up with his groping, while riding pillion on his motorbike. When he’s caught, Hector is not surprisingly, history.
Scene changes filled with some lovely a cappella versions of Eighties numbers (Dire Straits’ Money For Nothing, Tears For Fears’ Shout) establish the boys as a band of brothers, in happy harmony — but also slow the piece down.
Archie Christoph-Allen combines swank and sweetness as Dakin, the sexpot who is the focus of everyone’s desires. And Lewis Cornay’s Posner is a pure poppet (‘I’m a Jew. I’m small. I’m a homosexual. And I live in Sheffield’).
But this is not quite the 90th birthday present that national treasure Bennett deserves.
Lewis Cornay (left) as Posner in The History Boys at Bath Theatre Royal
History goes within a hair’s breadth (and the hair is important here) of repeating itself in A Night With Janis Joplin, writes Georgina Brown
History goes within a hair’s breadth (and the hair is important here) of repeating itself in A Night With Janis Joplin.
If you are expecting a musical charting Joplin’s talent and tragedy, you’re in for a disappointment. This is a night with Janis and the ghosts of the blues singers who ‘showed me the air and taught me how to fill it’.
It’s played as a gig. On comes the band, then the backing girls, then the dazzling lights, then the star herself: Mary Bridget Davies’s Janis.
A sturdy, rootsy hippy chick in velvet flares and a forgiving flowing shawl-shirt, her hair a wild mane, she appears untamed, unaffected and unselfconscious. Very like Janis. It’s an impersonation — and it’s a good one.
She tells us her mother’s musical taste and fabulous voice taught her everything about singing. She and her siblings did the chores to the tunes of West Side Story and My Fair Lady, and wore out the album of Porgy And Bess. Cue a ghost (Georgia Bradshaw), moving across a bridge high behind the stage, singing a stunning, classical version of Summertime.
Then Davies gives us Janis’s version, filtered through Janis’s heart and soul.
She explodes like a volcano, throwing herself into every raw, screeching note; snipping, stretching and strangling every syllable, stamping her feet, pumping her fists, singing the blues the way she felt them, and reinventing herself as a rocking, rolling rock ‘n’ roll mama.
Mary Bridget Davies’s Janis in A Night With Janis Joplin
Cast and musicians including Kalisha Amaris, Iestyn Griffiths, Georgia Bradshaw, Michael Joplin, Laura Joplin, Mary Bridget Davies, Mark Pusey, Danielle Steers and Choolwe Laina Muntanga bow during A Night With Janis Joplin
And so it goes, with every glorious number punctuated by a swig from a bottle of bourbon and a smattering of familiar autobiographical facts.
No revelations, no insights, no development. Instead (while Davies gets her breath back), a roll call of the singers who inspired her — Bessie Smith, Odetta, Nina Simone, Etta James, Aretha — each brought to magnificent vocal life by an exceptional supporting cast.
So is it better than YouTubing original footage? Possibly it’s for devotees only, but I felt a little piece of Janis’s heart. Take it.
- A Night With Janis Joplin runs until September 28 (anightwithjanisjoplin.com). The History Boys moves to Truro’s Hall For Cornwall next week. For tour dates visit ents24.com).
The 39 Steps (Trafalgar Theatre, London)
Verdict: Old chapeau
In Patrick Barlow’s spoof of Alfred Hitchcock’s version of John Buchan’s tale of derring-do, The 39 Steps, a cast of four juggle policemen’s helmets, trilbies, caps, bowlers and more, to play scores of crude cardboard cut-outs of cops and crooks.
Maria Aitken’s staging ran for years in the West End. It’s back in a slack, sluggish, witless revival which merely serves to highlight that comedies depending on breaking the theatrical illusion – with wobbly scenery, ludicrous accents, furniture and props arriving late, plus endless miming of hats and coats blown horizontal by a gale – have seen better days.
Old hats are old hat.
Tom Byrne, Maddie Rice, Eugene McCoy and Safeena Ladha bow at the curtain call during the press night performance of The 39 Steps
Pride And Prejudice at Jermyn Street Theatre, in London
Pride And Prejudice (Jermyn Street Theatre, London)
Verdict: Multi-tasking larks
Aa theatrical economies of scale go, the notion of Jane Austen’s cherished rom-com condensed for a cast of three seems a recipe for disaster.
Quite the reverse, as it turns out, in Abigail Pickard Price’s expertly filleted adaptation, which gets to the essence of Austen’s witty tale of a family of five daughters thrown into confusion by an assortment of variously eligible bachelors.
Swirling in and out of bonnets and coats (exquisitely trimmed, braided and frogged), the trio deliver Austen’s dialogue at an astonishing lick, bringing her characters to boisterous life.
Sarah Gobran’s grating caricature of Mrs Bennet as a vulgar social astronaut apart, Price’s production is deft, fleet and fun, with music and the fluidity and precision of a minuet.
Just a ribbon and a giggle are enough to suggest Lydia’s flightiness and Kitty’s silliness. A soldier’s jacket and a smirk nail the dastardly Wickham.
Already towering Luke Barton becomes even more so when he acquires a tiara as the impossibly haughty Lady Catherine de Bourgh.
But it is when the larking stops, in subtly nuanced scenes between April Hughes’s Lizzie Bennet and Barton’s Darcy, that this show excels.
- Pride And Prejudice is showing until September 7 (jermynstreettheatre.co.uk)
