I was in conversation with one of the Showstoppers improvisers, Adam Meggido, the other day, and he said something interesting about Stephen Sondheim, which in itself is quite unusual.

He loves and admires A Little Night Music as much as the next Sondheimite, but he found the production at the Garrick “sparkless.”

By which he meant somehow drained of life, preserved in aspic and sealed under glass. He adumbrated further: “Theatre is live and should always feel dangerous and spontaneous. This didn’t.”

There was no room for such critical heresy at the Young Vic last night, where Che Walker’s Been So Long, with a soul/blues/funk score by Arthur Darvill, tore up the musical theatre rule book and delighted a predominantly young and mixed-race audience.

Walker’s original play is quite slight, more an exercise in street argot and demotic between five losers in a Camden bar about to close for good. But instead of concentrating the thing down, he’s scaled it up so it’s like a rock Rigoletto for a non theatre-going audience.

It’s entirely devoid of the musical theatre cliches that are rife — love ‘em or hate ‘em — in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Sister Act. And despite the rigged stiltedness of the action, the people are real, and rather horribly so.

No wonder it’s going on to play a few gigs at the Latitude Festival before travelling north to the Traverse for the Edinburgh Festival fringe, where I predict it will wipe the floor with much worthier fare at that august harbinger of new writing.

In the wake of the disappointments and musty old art house predictablity of the so-called “boom” classical productions of the moment — the Jude Law Hamlet, the Mendes Old Vic double, the Helen Mirren Phedre — my faith has been renewed and restored by what I can only call the other “spontaneous” theatre, the alternatives to the cosily consensual, critically-approved mainstream.

These shows iclude not only Been So Long, but also the National Theatre of Scotland’s Peer Gynt, Spring Awakening, Pictures from an Exhibition at the Young Vic, Wally Shawn’s Grasses of a Thousand Colours at the Royal Court, Kursk (again at the Young Vic — my theatre of the year so far!) and For the Best at the Unicorn.
 
All of these, apart from being vastly preferable, and vastly more theatrically adventurous, had the sort of  spine-tingling aliveness that I think Meggido is talking about, the quality he seeks to engender in his improvised musical theatre shows, and they were all devoid of expectations of how an audience is supposed to behave in the theatre. 

I think we’re on the brink of a very interesting period where suddenly what is generally acclaimed as the standard on our subsidised stages will be completely subverted by the work around the edges, something that never quite happened during the first flush of the fringe in the mid 1970s. This will happen, and some time next century the critics will catch up.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 18th, 2009 at 11:54 am and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.