Are we barmy or what? Our mawkish obsession with the first world war demonstrates that we’re in the grip of a mass delusion: institutional sentimentality. The latest symptom of our death-mania is Nick Dear’s engaging play about the pastoral poet Edward Thomas, who was killed in action in 1917.
Thomas began writing verse aged 36 at the suggestion of his American chum Robert Frost. We first meet the pair in a West Country croft in 1914. Frost is a smug, wily and sententious trustafarian who likes the idea of tilling the earth but stops short of actually tilling it himself. Thomas, a suicidal depressive, is incapable of showing warmth to his wife, Helen, and his three squealing nippers. He regularly takes off on hiking holidays, leaving the missus to rustle up meals from the meagre scrapings of an isolated spud patch. Helen, a pacifist battle-axe, treats her part-time husband with a strange mixture of tooth-spitting rage and impulsive nymphomania. (After he dies, she has an award-winning breakdown while holding his pipe.)
This trio of warring outcasts is supplemented by Eleanor Farjeon, an arctic virgin besotted with Thomas, who writes operettas and who has never been kissed, she tells us, except on stage when playing Guinevere to her brother’s Lancelot. It all sounds pretty gruesome on paper. On stage, it’s a bit more appealing.
Pip Carter’s Thomas is a weird blend of literary whimsy and Greenpeace jingoism: he wants to sacrifice himself to save the topsoil of England that he loves. In a heavy-handed gesture, the Almeida stage has been covered with 600 bags of Miracle-Gro All Purpose compost to represent Thomas’s mulch fetish. The best performance in Richard Eyre’s production comes from Pandora Colin as the nerdy and nunnish Eleanor Farjeon. Hattie Morahan throws herself at the role of Helen and almost smothers her with hyped-up sentiment. But she wins the audience’s sympathy because the behaviour of the misogynistic Thomas almost defies belief. When Frost airily suggests that they all emigrate to New England, Thomas barks at Helen, ‘He doesn’t mean you!’ Frost eventually packs his bags for America where he sets about converting his modest talent for display-case poetry into an international reputation.
Thomas, meanwhile, focuses on dying. Aged 38, and nursing a serious kidney infection, he enlists in the most dangerous combat unit in the armed services: the artillery. He then lobbies hard to gain a posting in France where he persuades his superiors — who realise he has a death wish — to send him to the trenches. Job done. He’s promptly blown to smithereens by a German shell. What this heartfelt and touching play doesn’t reveal is that Thomas and Frost were mere also-rans in 20th-century literature. Today, Frost is fading fast, while Thomas’s reputation owes its temporary popularity to his glamorous, self-engineered death, and to our morbid fascination with the first world war. I can’t see any of this lasting.
I’m not a massive fan of musicals but I can tell a hit from a dud. Rule one: choose a story everyone’s familiar with. Sweet Smell of Success, filmed in 1952 with Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis, ticks the box. It’s a noir classic, an upside-down Othello, shrouded in grime, sweat and gun smoke. Director Mehmet Ergan has cast a great talent to play J.J. Hunsecker, the ruthless gossip columnist who can break a star’s reputation with a single sentence of snide innuendo. David Bamber was once a frothy and faintly bumptious comedian. He has aged, slimmed and matured very well. The plump genial face is now lined with forcefulness and depth. He delivers an owlish, tormented Hunsecker which is far more believable than Lancaster’s version because Lancaster exuded alpha-male sexual assurance whereas Hunsecker needs the pinched bitterness of the borderline pervert. Bamber reproduces this with great aplomb.
Some, but not all, of the acting matches his high standards. The dance troupe perform excellent work on the Arcola’s teeny stage. The jazz band is pretty sharp too. But the good news ends there. The music by Broadway legend Marvin Hamlisch, with lyrics by Craig Carnelia, is pretty patchy. A top-drawer team on bottom-drawer form. Many of the melodies are either forgettable or plain weird. Sidney Falcone, for example, performs a song in which he examines his decision to change his surname and to reduce its syllable count by one third. That, I suggest, is not the route to musical gold. The stand-out number, ‘Rita’s Tune’, is delivered by the ravishing Celia Graham, who plays a hooker hired to seduce a corrupt newspaper hack. More moments like that and the show might touch greatness. Every aspiring writer of musical theatre should visit this hit-and-miss show. By studying how it can go wrong, they’ll learn how to get it right.
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