Thursday, September 19, 2013
The Lightning Child, Shakespeare's Globe, review
Of all classical tragedies, it is perhaps The Bacchae that is the most fascinating to modern sensibility, with its themes of sexual ambiguity, uncontrollable appetites, physical and emotional blindness, orgiastic strong women and voyeuristic, controlling males (I paraphrase brutally, but you get the idea...)
The playwright Che Walker first encountered Euripedes' play two decades ago, when he appeared in it as a 21-year-old drama student. His new musical, written in collaboration with composer Arthur Darvill, has its origins in that overwhelming first experience.
Walker's musical reimagines the Dionysiac tragedy as a mash-up of classical and modern themes, juxtaposing the narratives of ancient Thebes with those of modern London, where a couple of junkies hazily debate the merits of cleaning up, and a pair of middle-class flatmates are driven to wild extremity by the sound of music. The astronaut Neil Armstrong gets a look-in, too, along with Billie Holiday and Lester Young.
Our guide to this tangle of variegated excess is Ladyboy Herald (Jonathan Chambers), a sweetly camp West Indian sidekick to the god, sporting gold nipple covers, chiffon bloomers, and a nice line in Kenneth Williams-ish obiter dicta: "Work it out for yourselves on the train home," he advises, in response to some particularly random plot tangle.
This is both good and bad advice. Trying to excavate something resembling a dramatic argument from Walker's sprawling meditation on excess is a hopeless task. It's best just to enjoy the spectacle, though that, too, is mixed. Paul Wills's designs have a jolly circus glitter, but Darvill's score, described in the press release as "a cacophonous stylistic concoction", fails to live up to either of those adjectives, and Charlotte Broom's wispy choreography for the maenads conjures disturbing memories of Pan's People.
There are good individual performances - Chambers's winning MC holds the whole thing together, while Bette Bourne and Geoff Aymer play Teiresias and Cadmus as a foul-mouthed classical Pete and Dud. Philip Cumbus and Harry Hepple as the addicts Drax and Shug make an admirable job of giving their thin material some substance.
Though self-indulgent and slackly directed, The Lightning Child is not without charm and gives the impression - at least while you're watching it - of being slightly more than the sum of its flimsy parts. Walker's intentions were probably of the utmost seriousness, but what he's ended up with is Bacchae - The Pantomime.
Until October 12, 2013. Tickets: 0207 401 9919; shakespearesglobe.com.
Source : http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/568414/s/3173aa06/sc/38/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Cculture0C10A320A8350CThe0ELightning0EChild0EShakespeares0EGlobe0Ereview0Bhtml/story01.htm
