Darkness visible | 14 June 2018

Oh, what a beautiful morning! In Jo Davies’s production of Oklahoma! the audience spends the overture staring at the side of a barn. Then, as birdsong rises from the orchestra, corrugated-iron doors slide open on a dustbowl farm of the 1930s. Aunt Eller (Claire Moore) is fixing a tractor, and a wind pump spins slowly against an orange dawn sky. It’s mildly surreal: the light falls as if in one of those New Deal-era western landscape paintings, with a jagged, David Smith-like sculpture of pitchforks and shovels serving as a tree. And then, with throwaway ease, Dex Lee as Curly launches into that greatest of all Broadway opening numbers.

Davies catches Rodgers and Hammerstein’s surge of hope on the upswing, and rides it in a single sweep from beginning to end. Bruno Poet’s lighting and Andrew Wright’s boisterous, rough-cut choreography are part of a single conception, one that manages to explore some remarkably sinister places without upsetting the show’s basic optimism. The cast is drawn primarily from musical theatre, and whatever the loss in purely vocal thrills (there’s light amplification, though everyone here can hold a tune, and as Laurey, Katie Hall’s top notes tingle) they make hay with the spoken dialogue.

So the comedy of the screwball love triangle — Annie (Natasha Cottriall), Will (Louis Gaunt) and Ali Hakim (Steven Serlin) — bubbles up naturally from the characterisation. Cottriall, in particular, is a delightfully likeable Annie with something serious to say, far from the usual calf-eyed ditz. Lee’s sunny charisma as Curly is a necessary foil for Hall’s Laurey — a young woman at snapping point, whose pigtailed self-possession shatters more than once into outright fury. Like I said, this is an Oklahoma! that isn’t afraid to go dark.