Avenue Q
Gielgud
Death of Long Pig
Finborough
It opened in 2006. The critics hated it. Two years later it was still running, but with audiences in decline last autumn Cameron Mackintosh announced its closure, which prompted a huge box-office surge. In the spring it was finally replaced by Calendar Girls but Avenue Q has boomeranged straight back into the West End. So what is it? I vaguely expected some schmaltzy Muppet Show spin-off but this is a more complex and unexpected creature. We’re in New York. On stage we see puppets whose figures are being manipulated by actors who ventriloquise a bit, although you can still see their lips move. That shouldn’t work but never mind. The characters are all adults but the rhyme schemes, the melodies and the upbeat musical texture is drawn from kids’ TV, and this sugary idiom is applied to the tribulations of professional life in the big bad city. It’s a brilliant piece of counter-intuition. Grown-up theme, kiddie approach. Saccharine and cynicism mingled. The first song questions the value of an English literature degree to the New York job-hunter — hardly an instant choice for the opening number of a hit musical, but beneath the nursery-rhyme innocence lies a lyric that’s funny, clever and alarmingly true. ‘Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist Sometimes’ examines an abiding obsession of the urban bourgeoisie and reminds us, in a cheery singalong anthem, that our overheated endeavours to neutralise prejudice merely reinforce the vice we want to diminish. When one of the puppets becomes homeless there’s a song about schadenfreude, which concludes that tramps, by cheering us up with a public exhibition of their misfortunes, deserve to be funded by general taxation. Creatively this is extremely daring. The show wants it both ways and gets it both ways. The world-weary sophistication is made palatable by the smiley sweetness of the music and the sunny optimism is tempered by a sceptical outlook which makes the optimism all the easier to embrace. Truth and escapism strolling arm in arm. Absolute genius. If it can run for three years it can run for ten. PS., though it features puppets it’s not really for kids under 12.
Nigel Planer (Neil the Hippie from The Young Ones) has set his latest play in Polynesia in the 1890s where both Robert Louis Stevenson and Paul Gauguin lived in exile. Stevenson exists very much as Stevenson would. He sweats, he coughs, he sweats a bit more. His son-in-law sponges, his pretty housemaid flirts, his ageing American wife nags him to write bestsellers rather than anthropological surveys of the Samoan people. Interesting enough, but the play has no story, no sense of development or growth, so the characters can only engage us as pageant mannequins. Sometimes this works, just about, and Stevenson occasionally comes across as a heroic free-thinker. Having travelled the Empire extensively he was well qualified to condemn it as an organised fraud run by ‘second-rate racketeers, nefarious missionaries and assorted broken white folk living on the bounty of the natives’. Elsewhere he succumbs to two dreadful afflictions, asthma and adjectives. Served a breakfast of mashed banana he addresses the brown mess as ‘an affirmation of the commonality of all humankind’. ‘One is overcome with a kind of refulgent effervescence, as if saturated then rinsed with the pulsy, pregnant, banana-y taste of life itself. Ooooh!’ Eventually he chokes on his thesaurus and vomits blood all over his nice white dress-shirt.
Over to Gauguin. A much less attractive character, the French polygamist is a broken-down lecherous drunk who decides to kill himself with a cocktail of absinthe and brandy to avoid being imprisoned for libel. Planer the playwright has a lordly disregard for the basics of dramatic writing. He lets his characters emerge through pools of vibrant and wildly unpredictable colour. You get some good detail but no storyline at all. His attitude to his minor characters is positively feudal and he happily keeps them hanging around on stage for half an hour or more with nothing to say or do. The Gauguin section also ends with the hero vomiting flamboyantly over himself and everyone else. There are many stimulating themes here, the struggle for inspiration, the rites of cannibalism, the tragic paradox of two artists who rejected European values just as the West was about to complete its cultural victory over the world, and the hypocrisy of Puritans who came to the Pacific and destroyed a savage Eden with the poisoned apple of Genesis. Fascinating but not remotely theatrical. Planer should have heeded Mrs Stevenson. He’s written the anthropological survey. We wanted the bestseller.
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