If you liked the film you’ll like the show, which gives you all the extra pizazz that only live theatre can deliver, and if you love ABBA it’s a must. Sentimental without being maudlin, great fun whilst keeping a sense of purpose, atmospheric lighting and bright costumes and with an uncluttered yet evocative set – everything conspires to make this great entertainment with a score few other recent musicals can match.
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O’Neill’s chunk of raw biography is human tragedy in which the domestic is elevated to a peak of grandeur. The playwright has publicly disembowelled himself and presented the heaving, diseased and suppurating offal for the world to see. Small wonder he didn’t want it produced during his lifetime. The term ‘dysfunctional home life’ hardly does credit to what is more like an arena in which competing personalities clash in an endless round of recrimination and guilt.
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The production would seem to owe more to Beckett than Brecht in that it sets about paring down to a minimum what we like to call the ‘action’ of the play. The audience is treated to a row of four chairs, which austerity is barely relieved by the odd prop – a bottle of stout here, a picture of ‘our Lord’ there. The actors, with hardly a sideways glance, sit facing out front, acting to the back of the auditorium.
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Private Lives does not poke fun at the way the middle classes actually carried on but, tongue-in-cheek and with ironically raised eyebrows mocked the way they might have behaved in the elegant world created by Mr.Coward. Of course times change and what was once risqué – for example unmarried, albeit divorced people, making love on stage – becomes unremarkable. In director, Tom Attenborough’s, production we find, unsurprisingly, no maturity, but a group of adolescents pretending or at least trying hard to be grown-ups.
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Those who like to be poked in the ribs by a musical are running out of excuses for not seeing Hairspray. Two films, a west End run and now a national tour of this hugely successful show find it packing them in at the Hippodrome. A cheerful satire on American TV and culture, a nod towards religious hypocrisy, a love story and a polemic against segregation in America – Hairspray takes on a lot in its packed, two plus hours . . .
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