Thursday, July 18, 2013
Josephine and I, Bush Theatre, review
The scene is that of an old-fashioned nightclub. The audience, wafting colourful fans thoughtfully handed out by the Bush Theatre on one of the hottest evenings of the year, sit at candlelit tables on gilt and velvet chairs, facing a stage that has a vaguely impromptu look, as though it is having a night off. A pianist enters and starts banging out a medley of show tunes with more enthusiasm than finesse. The house lights dim, the audience hushes. The show tunes go on. And on. Something is wrong. The audience grows restive and begins to chat...
From the ingenious trickery of its opening scene (which features yet another patient hound, Henry the poodle – the fifth live dog I have seen on stage in the course of the past year: evidently they are the fashionable prop of the moment) to its half-triumphant, half-elegiac ending, Cush Jumbo's solo show, based on the life of Josephine Baker, effervesces with energy and charm.
Jumbo, who stars in her own debut play, interweaves the story of Baker's life with a first-person narrative of an aspiring young actress, who faces an agonising choice between her professional ambition and her personal life (there are evidently elements of autobiography involved, but one has the impression that the character of the young actress is as much construct as confessional).
Jumbo's young alter ego was inspired by Baker as a child: she even gave her Tiny Tears dolly a Josephine make-over. As she grows up, her fascination with Baker extends from collecting memorabilia of the actress, to wishing to follow the same career. With that, we're off on an exhilarating whizz through the highlights of Baker's life, from her dire beginnings as a street dancer in St Louis, Missouri, to her wild success in the Revue Negre in 1920s Paris, her wartime work with the French Resistance, the brutal racism with which she was treated on her return to the United States, her support for the Civil Rights movement and her triumphant performance of Bob Dylan's The Times They Are a-Changin' – the song with which Jumbo closes her show – at Carnegie Hall in 1973.
Phyllida Lloyd, who directed Jumbo in her all-female production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar last year, directs with a sparkling ingenuity that is mirrored by Jumbo's own deliciously persuasive performance – by turns funny, touching and thought-provoking.
Until August 17, 2013. Tickets: 0208 743 5050; bushtheatre.co.uk
Source : http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/568414/s/2ed99674/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Cculture0Ctheatre0C10A18810A90CJosephine0Eand0EI0EBush0ETheatre0Ereview0Bhtml/story01.htm
