Orgy of confusion

Take a pile of bilge, add a bucket of drivel, stir in a few dead babies’ heads and you’ve got Coram Boy. The Olivier’s big Christmas production is a version of a kids’ book about abducted orphans in the 18th century. It’s certainly lavish. A huge cast, acres of costumes, enough lights to land the Shuttle, and an orchestra on stage. What for? An orgy of confusion and tedium, a choppy text and a gang of flouncing show-offs striding about the stage delivering ‘Egad, sir’ dialogue and occasionally breaking into a burst of Handel. Coram Boy, beware, is a curriculum text. The stalls are filled with parping, snickering, beeping teenagers and their earnest, breathy teachers, so it’s not so much a night at the theatre as a contest between audience and cast to see who can create the biggest, fussiest, stupidest and most hysterical quantity of meaningless noise. The stage wins, by a whisker. The show also contains the most gratuitous and nauseating piece of violence I’ve ever witnessed in a theatre. A baby being buried alive. Great fun. Most of the critics found the show profoundly moving. Or so they claimed. I’ve begun to suspect that critics aren’t interested in recording an honest response to a play; they’re more concerned with giving a favourable account of themselves. Any show that touches sensitive issues makes them dissolve into a warm gloop of simpering approbation.

Take Hampstead’s new play about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the American communists executed in 1953 for selling nuclear secrets to the Russians. This wordy, worthy ordeal was greeted in some of the national papers as a new masterpiece. It’s true there’s a great story here. The collective derangement that gripped America during the 1950s inspired Arthur Miller to write The Crucible.