Here’s something new to ban. Writers who use the Great War as an emotional backdrop to their stories. It’s embarrassing to see so many authors marching up the alley marked ‘failure of invention’. And it dishonours the dead to use their blood as wallpaper. Sadly the subject is just too tempting. It’s our equivalent of the Oedipus myth. Jocasta is the war. Oedipus is the eager recruit. Their union leads to mutilation, chaos, death and a wave of blood-guilt spreading down the generations. Michael Morpurgo’s novel War Horse focuses on the millions of animals who died in the trenches and the NT has put the book on the stage to coincide with the Christmas shopping season. Nice day out. Death and horror followed by éclairs and new dresses.
The show’s big selling point is the technical achievement of the Handspring Puppet Company. They’ve created the best pantomime horses you’ll ever see. Each has three operators manipulating the limbs and head to create an eerily fluid effect that somehow evokes the indefinable horseyness of horses. It’s amazing. But limited. Aside from the visuals, the show is on the Scooby Doo level. The main horse is very nice but is owned by a nasty man who has a nice son. The nasty man sells the horse to the army so the nice son volunteers and gets yelled at by a nasty sergeant-major. And on it goes. The show’s bizarre assumption is that horses are more interesting than people. And if you believe that you’re not a person. You’re a horse. Sure, the production will delight pony-mad kids but it’ll also bore adults to death. If you’ve got hippo-phile nippers send them along with the Pole and put your feet up at home.
Alex, the Telegraph cartoon, has waited 20 years to transfer to the stage. Dangerous enterprise. There’s a reason cartoons live in newspapers. They belong there. Rip them from their native habitat and you put them in grave peril. I should add that I’m not a massive Alex fan: it’s exquisitely drawn but imperfectly scripted, too prolix, too pun-crammed. But it works on stage. Alex is a thoroughly repugnant character, (a greedy, work-shy, egocentric swindler), and the cartoon cleverly smoothes his edges with that amiably goofy face and massive conk. Here Robert Bathurst’s ruffled charm makes him equally loveable.
The script is nimbler than I expected. ‘People say I’m a terrible snob. No, I’m not. I’m brilliant at it.’ The presentation mingles two formats, cartoon animation and Bathurst’s live action, and on numerous occasions his Alex has to inter-relate with the recorded bits. The dovetailing isn’t perfect. It’s not that the junctions are technically flawed, they’re fine. What I mean is that the two media are like custard and mustard, and their juxtaposition gives the show a wonky rhythm. But it’s good harmless fun. One bonus, for me anyway, was to discover what City people actually do at work. Ask a real banker and he’ll laugh like a machine-gun, say, ‘Work? What’s that?’, and change the subject. But ‘Alex’ is grounded in the moral conflicts and tough commercial judgments that investors have to make. That’s its strength, its attachment to life, its nourishment from authentic sources of drama and anecdote. One point. It’s very short so if you’re taking a group of City bores out on a junket you’ll only be spared their company for 75 minutes.
Musicals? Boo. Straight plays? Hooray. That’s the standard reaction of critics to this long-running West End dilemma. (But it’s a rare critic who’ll admit the real reason we dislike musicals. They’re demeaning to review. You can’t use words like ‘zeitgeist’, ‘auteur’ or ‘nuanced’, whatever that means. You have to be silly and say things like ‘dynamite’ and ‘wow!’.) So thank goodness for a straight play that’s dislodged a musical from the Vaudeville Theatre. Swimming with Sharks stars Christian Slater as Buddy Ackerman, a ruthlessly ambitious movie executive locked in a power struggle with his deadliest rival, Dawn Lockard. The material isn’t massively original but the show is slick, pacy and beautifully designed, and the script delivers guilty pleasures. Watching an office tyrant bullying the trainees over botched cappuccinos and diary mix-ups is peculiarly cathartic. And Christian Slater is extremely funny without ever being a comedian. He doesn’t need to try. His face, with its unsettling blend of the choirboy and the psychopath, automatically gives him the look of the charismatic thug. Helen Baxendale’s Dawn, described by Buddy as ‘a knife with hips’, is played with her trademark stony sexiness. Good vicious fun.
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