Lloyd Evans
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High hopes at the Chocolate Factory. The Southbank’s liveliest producing house has a great record for taking shows into the West End. Musicals are a speciality and the latest has just arrived from New York. Forbidden Broadway was created nearly three decades ago by rookie writer Gerard Alessandrini who hoped it might earn him some hackwork as a lyricist. The show ran for 27 years. In this version, spruced up and adapted for London, every aspect of theatre gets a splattering. Costly tickets, tacky souvenir shops, greedy impresarios, the glut of film revivals and the use of video projections instead of real sets. Overhyped musical flops (like the recently defunct Spring Awakening) are subjected to a particularly venomous strain of grave-jigging satire. At its best, the show pulls off a magnificent double and matches populist gags with sophisticated wit. In the Oliver! spoof, Nancy enters — bodice torn, head bleeding — and launches into a feminist critique of the masochistic anthem, ‘As long as he needs me’: ‘I’ll suffer Cameron’s scorn/ I’ll limp for Matthew Bourne/ I’ll dress like I’m in porn/ As long as he beats me.’
There are a few creative hiccups. Renaming Billy Elliot ‘Silly Idiot’ isn’t perhaps the greatest feat of invention in literary history and the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang take-off (you can guess how Chitty is satirised) is so vitriolic that it induces a pathos shift and makes you pity the original and spurn the caricature. Some of the props look a bit Blue Peter-ish and the Andrew Lloyd Webber skit needs work. ‘The Lord’ appears in a technicolour dreamcoat stroking a toy cat to the sound of Jesus Christ Superstar. Couldn’t decipher that at all. The cast, happily, have been drilled to perfection but still look as if they’re having a whale of a time. Steven Kynman has the touch of a natural comedian and Anna-Jane Casey’s adorably daft parody of Liza Minnelli deserves YouTube status. Can anything go wrong? Well, the gods may not smile on a musical that takes so much malevolent delight in mocking shows that have expired prematurely and left their producers yachtless. Mind you, the rhapsodies of joy I witnessed at a sold-out Sat-mat performance suggest that this one is heading across the river. Tacky souvenir shop and all.
David Greig’s holocaust play starts with a reminder that any Jew found outside the Warsaw ghetto would be shot. My feeling is that any playwright found inside the Warsaw ghetto should get the same treatment. The situation is so loaded with suffering, irony, despair and every other kind of dramatic Semtex that it requires exceptionally skilful fingers to make it work. Greig focuses on the ghetto orphanage and a love–hate relationship between two damaged kids who shout VERY LOUDLY at each other a lot. It’s the Holocaust for the Hollyoaks generation, the final solution with a spoonful of sugar. Amy Leach’s spirited production hangs neatly together and brings out the script’s limited range of effects extremely well.
The founder of the orphanage is a liberal paediatrician, Dr Korczak, who champions civilised values in the somewhat unlikely hope that the Nazis will follow suit. Korczak’s work formed the basis of the international convention on children’s rights and the play ends with a recital of the privileges he wanted to guarantee. These include ‘the right to love, the right to fail, the right to education and the right to resist education’. Fascinating. Where but in the Warsaw ghetto would anyone dream of loading childhood with limitless freedoms and entitlements? This explains why the concept of ‘universal rights’ is so impractical and wrong-headed and leads inevitably to resentment, injustice and false expectation. It’s the shopping list of the damned, the consoling fantasy of a slave population on death row.
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