A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Novello
Thriller — Live
Lyric
Too long. Too long. Way, way too long. Is it just me or is A Midsummer Night’s Dream twice the length it should be? No, it’s not just me. It’s everyone. It has to be. And I blame the movies. Billy Wilder reckoned a comedy should last no more than an hour and a half. ‘Every minute over 90,’ he said, ‘counts against you.’ Obviously, films aren’t plays but we’ve been schooled unwittingly in the celluloid aesthetic and we can’t park it in the cloakroom, we bring it to the auditorium.
It seems odd that directors will happily lumber Shakespeare with all kinds of bad-choice complexities (pin-stripe suits, girls playing boys, video projections, guns for swords) in an effort to accommodate the Elizabethan world to modern tastes and yet they’re reluctant to acknowledge our conviction that comedies should be brisk, punchy affairs which release you from their enchantment within two hours.
So I always approach the Dream with dread and in this case my fears, most of them anyway, proved groundless. Greg Doran’s production has a pleasing lack of time-warp novelty. He suits the Athenian noblemen in jackets and trousers but gets away with it, and he locates the wood-fairies, as the script suggests, in a wood rather than in Butlins, or Guantanamo Bay, or a Glasgow crack-den, or a centre for moral correction in Soviet Russia, or an oil-tanker, or an eco-pod, or a donkey sanctuary, or Mars. Nope, it’s a wood. Good.
Kathryn Drysdale (the geeky bird from Two Pints of Lager) plays Hermia with butter-fingered charm and breezy comic assurance. Tom Davey, recently promoted from Guildenstern to Laertes during David Tenant’s enforced sabbatical from Hamlet, shows quite a gift for light comedy here as Lysander despite being hampered by his chiselled good looks. Hard to play the fool if you have the physique of a model. In the play’s closing moments, Sam Alexander, as the pompous steward Philostrate, delivers a delightful essay in understated irony and there’s good work from Ryan Gage as Thisbe in the mock theatricals. This section is extremely funny, in parts, and in other parts considerably less funny than it thinks it is. Overall it’d be tons more effective if it didn’t come after the audience had been sitting in the theatre for two and three quarter hours. The final tableau (a dependable combination of blue and gold) is an exquisite cushion on which to rest your jaded peepers after the marathon. Oh, by the way, I rather assume everyone finds the Dream a nightmare. If you love it, this is a must-see.
Thriller — Live is the misleading name for a brilliantly entertaining Michael Jackson tribute show. It opens in the early Seventies with the child prodigy (beautifully played by Sterling Williams) pumping out ‘I Want You Back’ and visits all the soaring high points of Jackson’s career. Rather than merely doing a copycat job the show cleverly distributes the role of vocalist between a handful of singers, the best of whom is Denise Pearson from Eighties band Five Star (remember them? Er, me neither).
There’s no narrative here nor, in the future, is there any danger of the Wacko back-catalogue being turned into a soppie blockbuster like Mamma Mia. The material is too macabre. He started out as a simple popster but as his skin got lighter the lyrics got darker. Songs like ‘She’s Dangerous’ suggest a world-outlook in which women are agents of disorder and provocation. ‘Billie Jean’ is a bizarre expression of emotional paranoia (‘the kid is not my son’) and, weirdest of all, ‘Thriller’ is accompanied by a video in which Jackson starts off squiring a pretty young girl home and then suddenly morphs into a red-eyed zombie with slavering fangs. Not exactly feelgood pop. Overfamiliarity had dulled my senses to the quality of these songs and it was a revelation to hear them interpreted afresh. Just listen to those bass-lines! Michael Jackson has penned some of the best riffs never to have been played by a rock band. ‘Beat It’, with its haunting and deliberately incomplete motif, sounds like a heavy metal classic. A band like Elbow or Black Rebel Motorcycle Club should cover it. As for the man himself I’m among those who scan him as a harmless dupe rather than a dangerous predator. The real pervs try to cover everything up. They don’t call in the cameras and do an hour face to face with Martin Bashir. This is a dazzling show and Jacko fans will love it to bits.
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