Big ship hits iceberg. Lots of people drown.
Cast:
Barrett, the Stoker – James
Austen Murray
Lightoller – Dominic Brewer
Kate Mullins – Scarlett Courtney
Bride, the Radio Operator –
Matthew Crowe
Kate Murphy – Grace Eccle
Alice Beane – Celia Graham
Edgar Beane – Oliver Hemborough
Ismay – Simon Green
Mr Etches – James Hume
Caroline Neville – Clare Marlowe
Jim Farrell – Shane McDaid
Captain Smith – Philip Rham
Kate McGowan – Victoria Serra
Creative Team:
Book – Peter Stone
Music and lyrics – Maury Yeston
Director – Thom Sutherland
MD – Mark Aspinall
Set and Costumes – David Woodhead
Lighting – Howard Hudson
It was the day when the heatwave
finally broke, after a week of muggy, vile, humid weather. It was a horrendously sticky evening and a
desultory rainstorm wetted the pavements but did nothing to clear the air. It was like walking through soup. And the air conditioning in the theatre had
broken down completely. Consequently
sitting there waiting for the show to start was like sitting fully clothed in a
Turkish bath. Every programme was being
pressed into service as a fan and every other scrap of paper in the theatre had
been scavenged by those without them.
People began wondering aloud whether on payment of a suitable sum the
Producer might actually allow the iceberg to make an earlier than scheduled
appearance just to lower the temperature in the auditorium, or whether the
journey to New York might not actually be in peril if the iceberg had, indeed,
already melted. The show started,
foreheads glistened, stage makeup began to slide off faces and everyone
silently sympathised with men wearing heavy period overcoats. Lines about how unusually cold it was for
April were met with rueful laughter.
Two-thirds of the way through the first half, the show juddered to a
sudden halt. The Director announced that
we had hit an iceberg labelled “Health and Safety” and that The Show Could Not
Go On because of the temperature in the
auditorium; Voyage Suspended until something had been done about it. The audience piled into the lifeboats and
waited, bobbing about in the swell. I
wondered whether we would ever get to New York at this rate. Some 30 minutes later, the engines restarted,
the audience climbed back on board and we were off again . The Band Played
On -
sans violinist and sans viola who had been unable to keep their
instruments in tune as the humidity in the auditorium was making their catgut
go all limp and drippy. The cast wrung
out their costumes and prepared to hit the iceberg. By the time the Carpathia had delivered the
survivors to New York it was gone 11pm, the cast were completely knackered
(having already done a matinee that afternoon) and in the audience, T shirts
and underwear were clinging to backs and bums like passengers to a
lifebelt. Still, we all stood up and
applauded like there was no tomorrow – mostly out of sheer relief but also
because the cast had stayed at their posts and given the performance with
considerable welly right to the bitter end, probably for Equity Minimum. I dread to think what the dressing rooms
smelt like the next day.
This is a difficult show to do
with a small cast – there are 22 singing roles, as well as a slew of small
named speaking roles (many of whom make an appearance in the embarkation scene
and then essentially disappear), so there was a lot of doubling up going on,
sometimes to the detriment of coherence.
Still, they managed, and on the whole managed well. This is also a difficult show to do when your
performance area is a “black box” and you have to have audience on three
sides. Still, they managed, and managed
well. A back wall of black metal panels
gave some idea of the scale of the ship (and the enterprise being undertaken)
and there was a clever gantry, accessed by tall sets of metal steps on wheels
which gave additional performing space and some sense of perspective. A nice directoral touch was to have the names
of all those lost in the disaster scroll across the floor in an illuminated “role of honour”
There were some excellent
performances. James Austen-Murray made a
fine and believable Barrett (the Head Stoker), sporting a pair of shoulders
that I would kill for. His duet with
Bride, the Radio Operator (Matthew Crowe) was nicely handled direction-wise and
was, I thought, underscored with a slight sexual frisson – did the socially
maladjusted Bride, happier communicating by morse code than with real people,
think that all his all his dreams had come true when a sweaty, beefy stoker
wandered into the Telegraph Cabin? Celia
Graham handled the role of the irritating Alice Beane and her ferociously
difficult solo number with considerable aplomb and James Hume played Mr Etches,
the First Class Steward in the style of a slightly affronted heron, exactly how
the character should be portrayed. I was
less impressed with Dudley Rogers and Judith Street’s performances as Isidor
and Ida Strauss and I really, really did not like the direction of their final
number. Street was hampered in her
performance of what should be a heart-rending duet by trying to clamber into a
somewhat unflattering costume while singing it.
The role of Mr. Andrews, the architect of Titanic, was watered down almost
to the point of invisibility by giving the opening song to Ismay, the owner of
the WhIte Star Line. Doing so kept
Andrews out of the audience’s field of vision until it was too late for the
character to really register. Simon
Green was the perfect casting for Ismay – Green does the “conceited tosser” far
too well for it to be anything other than who he really is.
The show itself is flawed – its
top heavy and there is at least one number (“Doing the latest rag”) that seems
superfluous. With its cast of millions
it runs the risk of over-egging the pudding and trying to cram too many stories
into the mix. It cannot be denied that
the problems with this particular performance made the show seem a lot longer
than it appears. But I cannot fault the
dedication of the cast who gave a sterling performance under extremely trying
and difficult conditions. During the
lifeboat scenes towards the end there were a couple of individuals on stage who
were so “in” their performances that I found it quite distressing to watch them
– Scarlett Courtney in her uncredited role of Lady Duff Gordon seemed to be
living the part to such an extent that I do wonder how she managed to sleep
that night.
A round of applause to all involved for soldering on under
incredibly difficult circumstances.
What the critics thought:
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