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Thursday 4 December 2008

Parisian decadence

Marguerite (Haymarket), The Good Soul of Szechuan (Young Vic), Under Milk Wood (Tricycle)

This ought to be a hit. The Les Mis team are back in the West End with another French classic. The Lady of the Camellias, by Alexandre Dumas fils, is the play that inspired Verdi’s La Traviata and the Garbo film Camille. Retitled Marguerite the story has been parked in wartime Paris where the leading lady is servicing a Wehrmacht general. A sticky corner of history to choose. Occupied Paris forces us to make uncomfortable moral decisions about the characters. Who do we side with? Marguerite, perhaps. But she’s a collaborator. Her friends? They’re all parasites and profiteers who call the RAF ‘barbarians’ and want the British to lose the war. The soon-to-be-jilted lover, Otto? Yes, but he’s a weepy, thuggish, bullet-headed German sourpuss who hates jazz, calls Marguerite a whore and threatens to rape her. Oh, and he’s a Nazi. Whoops! At least there’s the new boyfriend to cheer for. Armand, a beautiful and extraordinarily gifted young pianist, has fallen hopelessly in love with Marguerite. Once he joins the Resistance he’ll settle our moral qualms and become a shining symbol of virtue and courage, the spirit of Free France, and he’ll dramatise the eternal conflict between duty and passion. But uh-oh. He doesn’t join the Resistance. (His sister does instead.) He just sprawls around in his underpants snogging Marguerite and singing duets. These characters have no purchase on our sympathies whatsoever, and even the fine performances can’t salvage them.

Ruthie Henshall is perfectly lovely as Marguerite. Andrew C. Wadsworth as her cynical agent Georges is suave, cool and highly entertaining. And Julian Ovenden does an athletic turn as the personality-free couch potato Armand. The songs are OK but hardly outstanding. There’s heaps of earnest shouty dialogue and the narrative is very lopsided. It idles for an hour and a half and then crashes through its last transitions in 20 minutes. The best thing on view is Paul Brown’s main set, a fabulously ornate mirrored hotel which rivals the lovely gilded interior of the Haymarket. On the night I went the packed house gave the show a standing ovation (well, four of them did anyway) but it still felt perfunctory and uninvolving to me, like a party full of people you don’t really like. Hopefully I’m wrong but I fear this bird won’t soar.

More articles from: Lloyd Evans | this section

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