Peripatetic pleasures

All for the best in the best of all possible worlds: the National Theatre's triumphant new ensemble moves rapidly from Troilus and Cressida to Candide on the open Olivier stage and, if anything, with still greater success. For more than 40 years, this has been a work in progress; Leonard Bernstein's score opens with what is unquestionably the greatest Overture in the whole history of the American musical, but its problems have always started from there.

The original idea may have seemed simple enough, a singalong version of the Voltaire peripatetic classic starring its title character and, as narrator, its maddeningly optimistic philosopher Dr Pangloss. Yet, going right back to 1956 (the musical's birth coincides with that of the same composer's West Side Story, and at least one song destined for the former ended up in the latter), fully half a dozen of America's greatest writers have been defeated by it. Credits thus now feature such diverse talents as those of Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, the American poet laureate Richard Wilbur, Stephen Sondheim, playwright Hugh Wheeler and lyricist John laTouche. Legendary and innovative directors from Tyrone Guthrie to Hal Prince have tried to make sense of it, as did John Mauceri and the late John Wells more recently for Scottish Opera. New York alone has seen at least five major revivals, one as recently as last year with Jim Dale, and all of them have died a variety of commercial and artistic deaths.

But now, at long, long last, we have it as damn near right as we are ever likely to get it; sure it is still overlong, rambling, circuitous and ultimately kind of a shambles, something akin to Peer Gynt performed underwater, but the genius of the current staging is to take all our minds off that unhappy truth with a series of dazzling stage moments none of which depends on technical wizardry or expensive props and costumes.

We open on a bare stage with Simon Russell Beale, in a dazzling musical debut as Pangloss, seated astride an actor's trunk listening, in the only major mistake of the evening, to the aforementioned Overture, one that we need to be able to hear without the distraction of an actor trying to respond to its many moods by a series of facial grimaces. From then on things can only get better, and believe me they do; Beale is rapidly joined by a Commedia dell'Arte troupe who proceed to play all the characters of the evening while, never offstage, he himself doubles Voltaire and Pangloss as our guide through Voltaire's labrynthine travelogue of the mind.

As a team of directors, John Caird (who here takes precedence) and Trevor Nunn have always been at their best translating an apparently unwieldy and unstageable novel, be it Nicholas Nickleby or Les Misrables, to the footlights with a permanent and classical company at full stretch and in full cry, and that is precisely what we have here. There are some nicely self-referential touches (Denis Quilley, the original London Candide back in 1958, is now the old curmudgeon Martin), and, although the present hero, Daniel Evans, is a little too eager to reprise his recent National Peter Pan opposite a hopelessly uncharismatic Cunegonde from Alex Kelly, the characterplaying of their elders and betters is just magical, not least from Quilley, Alexander Hanson, David Burt and, as the old woman with one buttock, Beverley Klein. One buttock? As they say or rather sing in the show, don't ask.

A show that has only ever nearly worked is infinitely more fascinating to consider than one which has never failed, which is why I regard this Candide as a far greater triumph of rediscovery and reconsideration and revival than Nunn's recent National Oklahoma!; it is precisely because of its apparent faults, and the room therefore to let for improvements, that Candide remains so tantalising and elusive, lingering in the mind and the musical memory long after better-rounded and more complete scores have faded.

Like the often underrated Man of La Mancha, Candide is a 'quest' musical, and it is only when we realise the journey, rather than the arrival, is its whole reason for theatrical existence that we can at long, long last appreciate its wayward genius. It is not often, after all, that Broadway heroes get spit-roasted by savages, or come to final recognition that the life of a world traveller is never going to be as exciting as doing a little backyard gardening, though in that context you might just be able to cite Voltaire as one of the starting points for Wizard of Oz. But the wizardry here has a lot to do with the confidence of a new National company, taking to the open stage as if they have worked there forever; Candide may be Voltaire rather than Shakespeare, but it is no less of a challenge than Troilus in its sprawling, cynical, circus-like style. Of the first disastrous production in 1956, a then 25-year-old Sondheim noted that `Hellman wrote a black comedy, Lennie wrote a pastiche score, and then Guthrie directed it like a wedding cake'. The genius of the current revival is to embrace all those apparent contradictions in the show, and then find a style of its own that would solve nearly all the problems of an imperfect musical about an imperfect world.

I wish I could share the enthusiasm of many of my colleagues for the new Sean Mathias staging of Tennessee Williams's rarely seen Suddenly Last Summer at the Comedy. True, Mathias has not here performed the one-man wrecking operation he recently carried out on Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, Sondheim's A Little Light Music and Coward's Design for Living, but nor has he learnt the lesson of the great Liz Taylor/Katharine Hepburn movie of 40 years ago, in which they simply put the poison and the acid down in old Louisiana and finished up with a memorably dark thriller instead of an overblown opera-comique.

This is just another everyday story of homely Williams folk, in which a wealthy gay man gets eaten alive while cruising a beach, only to have his mother try to lobotomise his girlfriend lest she tell the awful truth. What made the movie so memorable was the power struggle of the two women, but in the Mathias staging there is no contest, just Sheila Gish, one of our finest actresses, unfathomably dressed and directed to look like Dame Edna Everage playing Cruella deVille in a bad Disney cartoon. When an undercast Rachel Weisz, as the girl, notes that this is `just a true story of our time', one is tempted to reflect on the vast number of one's friends who have been eaten alive while cruising a gay beach; but the real tragedy is that no one here has apparently thought of subtlety or the virtues of underplaying.

Tim Hatley's set looks like something left over from a bad tour of Into the Woods, and on every occasion where he has had the choice Mathias has simply gone over the top instead of into the subtext. As in his recently-savaged Dietrich concert for Sian Phillips on Broadway, shlock always replaces subtlety; Mathias, a failed playwright, is now fatally determined to become a star director by stamping his operatic, hothouse nature all over any text he touches, and the result is a misconceived mishmash in which what should be cool comes over as cloying, what should be distanced is dire, and all terror has been replaced by camp theatricality. Once again he has done his dramatist and his cast no service of any kind.

Copyright Spectator Apr 24, 1999
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved