Return of the "Mogadon bender"

Too Close to the Sun

Comedy Theatre

* (One star)

According to the press materials, Too Close to the Sun is a “dramatic new musical... account of what might have been Ernest Hemingway’s last challenge”. I think the phrase “what might have been” will very soon come to haunt this doomed enterprise.

Flicking through the programme, trying to fight off waves of giggles and pervasive boredom during the first act of this evening’s preview, I struggled to find the name of which misguided producer had financed this disaster of a show. I finally set eyes upon the name “GBM Productions”, which, according to their website (for they didn’t have a biography in the brochure) exists only to produce the work of the composer, John Robinson.

John Robinson and GBM’s previous foray into the West End was as composer and producer of The Man Behind the Iron Mask which, when it opened at the Duchess Theatre in 2005, was greeted by The Guardian newspaper with a one-star review concluding with the words: “the sheer ineptitude of the evening bears all the hallmarks of the West End equivalent of vanity publishing. In this case it is not just a vanity project but a calamity project”. Charles Spencer of the Telegraph spared no punches: he proclaimed “It's so bad that it is merely unendurable… relentlessly, agonisingly third-rate” with a cast that "perform as if they have been on a prolonged Mogadon bender".

[Image: Man Behind the Iron Mask, from Guardian Unlimited]

Keeping his head down after the Dumas fracas, Robinson seems to have spent the last four years preparing this next show, a musical retelling the days running up to the suicide of the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winning American writer, Ernest Hemingway. With Press Night a week away, I hope GBM and Robinson are prepared for another onslaught. This evening, my friend and I imagined it might have been a lot less painful all around had Hemingway turned the gun on himself (or us) during the overture and saved a lot of bother all round.

For what it’s worth, Too Close to the Sun is a fictional account by Ron Read with lyrics by Roberto Trippini and Robinson himself. It is laid on thick that Hemingway is an aging lothario whose ill-health and vices including liquor and hunting with guns (cue Act II) are only kept at bay by his stern fourth wife Mary, played by Helen Dallimore (better known to West End audiences as a squeaky Glinda the Good). I say laid on thick, as the aging is emphasised in an excruciating opening number Think Good Thoughts sung monotonously by West End veteran James Graeme as Hemingway, whilst straining to act a keep-fit regime and contemplating the transparency of his own urine [sic].

His aging, infidelities and fondness for hunting are then together underlined in an incomprehensible and unintentionally hilarious perfunctory scene in which a wittering Hemingway dismantles and reassembles a shotgun (did I mention what happens at the end?) whilst blindfolded and soliloquizing about where and when in the past something or other had happened as if to indicate a struggle with dementia and depression. Bizarre.

But what an exciting life we are meant to think Hemingway has had, soaring, Icarus-like Too Close to the Sun. What a shame that the pre-interval title number, performed by our leading man straining on his knees and clutching an as yet unconsumed bottle of whisky, is as unmemorable and lacklustre as most of the music which preceded it.

Also living in the transparent, wooden-framed, trophy-clad, revolving ranch is Louella, introduced with a secret smooch and her song The Sentimental Small-Towner That I Am. She is an underemployed assistant, played by American actress Tammy Joelle, whose sirenian presence is barely tolerated by Ernest’s wife. And just to mix things up a bit, an old school friend and all-round rake Rex is invited to stay and is seeking the rights to produce a film of Hemingway’s life – tonight he was played by red-faced understudy Christopher Howell. It turns out that Rex has had his way with both Louella and Mary (the latter, reminiscing in a Spanish themed number Havana which for me rather evoked the Lambada), though his real purpose, I guess, is to provide some gobbet of plot in this otherwise dreary set-up. He also provided some colour, though his musical numbers, including I like to be liked and Hollywood! Hollywood! are incongruous.

I’d love to tell you how it all pans out… but after seventy minutes of this tripe I couldn’t take any more and snuck out at the interval. I guess from the programme that Forgive Me, Wife. You’ll Understand is the moment of Ernest’s extinction, given that it is followed by the remaining characters’ The Regret and I Did My Best.

The press release concludes “in this suggested account of events leading to Hemmingway's death, can there be any winners?”. Unless there’s a miracle before the Press opening, this may yet prove a shorter run than The Man Behind The Iron Mask, which closed after just eighteen days (?22 performances). Ticket prices are up to £52.50. Don’t do it.

"Showbusiness - the best possible therapy for remorse” (Anita Loos)

Blink! And You Missed It
Above the Stag Theatre

**

In the year since its conception as a dedicated fringe space for gay theatre, Above the Stag has hosted a number of fine productions. Plays such as Pride, The Choir and Minor Gods have largely lived up to their ambitious production values and provided moving and thought-provoking performances.

Discounting last week's horrendous and amateur Gay School Musical, (as if High School Musical wasn't gay enough already), which was thankfully only a filler for a few nights, Blink! is The Stag's first attempt at an in-house musical. It is a collaboration with Tim McArthur (better known of Trilby Productions and the inimitable drag nun [sic] Sister Mary).

The conceit of Blink! is to present a revue of musical numbers from shows which were flops when originally presented. A worthy aim, of course, if somewhat broadly defined, with little internal consistency. Some of the offerings such as Silence! (the Hannibal Lecter musical) never made it beyond fringe productions off-off-Broadway. Others, such as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Bombay Dreams are labeled flops for this show because although they were successful in London, they were not warmly received on the other side of the Pond. Some, we are told, had disastrous openings (Anyone Can Whistle had only nine performances before its opening run closed) and others were initially greeted skeptically only to return successfully in the years to come (La Cage Aux Folles). And there’s also the inevitable quandary between shows which were successful with the critics and awards and yet closed prematurely (SideShow – a musical about Siamese twins – was met by critical acclaim and four Tony nominations and yet ran for only 91 shows, a similar fate being suffered recently in London by Drowsy Chaperone). I suppose there’s no real problem with this confused definition of a flop… except that under the heading Blink! And You Missed It, it feels a little uneasy to be presented with some numbers that have by no means been 'missed' such as I Am What I Am, from La Cage.

On Press Night earlier this week, the slightly grimy bar was unusually teeming – a good sign. Ascending to the above-pub studio space, the first thing to greet the audience member is a eclectic collection of flyers of the flop musicals were about to see extracts from. The remainder of the set comprises an upright piano, played competently (if not faultlessly) by Debbie Morris, with a backdrop of cardboard golden stars, giving a hint of the Broadway glamour to which the shows had aspired to but invariably failed to achieve. It is a shame that the designer was persuaded also to display yellow print outs of various flop show titles – these, alas, gave more the impression of a primary school teacher excited by a new laminator, than a star studded revue. The cast of five, was largely handsomely clad in plain costumes, with occasional touches of glamour and flair added including pink feather boas for the La Cage scenes, and, hilariously, two girls were tied together with a giant golden bow for the scene from Side Show.

In terms of musical execution, a grand shout-out must go to the girls: Julia Addison, performed a tenacious Everybody’s Girl; Elena Rossi and Nikki Gerard also provided professionalism and colour to their numbers and were a joy to watch. Tim McArthur is credited with devising and directing the show and also proved a competent, if unpolished, hoofer. Invidious as it may seem to single out a dud, Alexander Bradford’s contribution lacked confidence, rhythm and, for many of his numbers, adequate vocal range.

The whole show was narrated light heartedly with a book of facts and figures about the shows being performed, exactly in the manner of Side By Side By Sondheim, the very similar and well established review comprising Sondheim’s own hits and flops. Unfortunately on Wednesday, the cast stumbled throughout in the delivery of these nuggets of information and after initial amusement I was left wishing they had instead decided instead to narrate from a printed script.

A final niggle surrounds a slightly incongruous medley of “actor-muso” pieces (including Sweeney Todd, Company, and Sunset Boulevard). Why does this niggle? Firstly, whether any of these count as flops, I doubt, Sweeney marked the first West End transfer for 10 years of a Sondheim show then ran for over year on Broadway and won two of its six Tony nominations, Company ran for eight months and won the Tony for best revival, and Sunset, which attracted a host of awards first time round, recently ran for eight months in its reduced form. Secondly, the entire gag is swiped wholesale from a previous incarnation of Forbidden Broadway, which is currently providing a slicker (if somewhat more expensive) night out at the Menier Chocolate Factory fringe theatre in Southwark.

Back at the stag, two unfortunate heckles were enjoyed by the audience, if not the cast: singing I Am What I Am draped in five feather boas from his co-performers, Tim McArthur’s opening lines were interrupted by a wisecracking interjection “what are you then, a chicken?!”; in the closing moments, when audience members were invited to suggest other musical flops, another smartarse’s interjection that “Blink!” might be included was met by genuine perplexity before the penny dropped.

Overall I was left with the feeling that I’d had a pleasant evening of largely satisfactory performances of some interesting forgotten gems. I regretted that the show wasn’t as slick as some of the Stag’s recent work, and wondered if they’d be better off attempting to stage an entire show… Silence! or SideShow are surely begging for a London try-out and have the scope for cult appeal.

Whatsonstage gave the show ***** - I wonder if they accidentally wandered into Wicked by mistake.

“Raze out the written troubles of the brain” Macbeth 5,3

[First published in the Royal College of Psychiatrists London Division Newsletter, June 2009
http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/pdf/royal%20col%20of%20psy%20iss9%20final.pdf ]

Who needs patients, when there’s a wealth of educational psychopathology being performed in the West End?

It won’t have escaped the attention of psychiatrists in the capital with an interest in performing arts that the National Theatre’s autumn season last year had at its core a revival of Sophicles’ Oedipus Rex. Jonathan Kent directed a new translation by Frank McGuinness with Ralph Feinnes as the king, fumbling blindly in search for the truth of his origins. As the stage revolve in the Olivier rotated imperceptibly a palpable tension was created among the audience as we waited for the tragedy to reach its inevitable conclusion.

Later in the season Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (by Tom Stoppard and André Previn), also on the Olivier Stage, demonstrated the dilemma for a psychiatrist between determining what is a thought content abnormality (the delusional belief that one is an orchestral conductor) and what is a thought crime (“Your opinions are your symptoms... your disease is dissent”). At the Almeida in Islington, Juliet Stevenson will be playing a successful musician in consultation with her psychiatrist, played by Henry Goodman, in a revival Duet for One, by Tom Kempinski this spring.

However, even theatregoers who don’t choose to seek out such apparently relevant productions may find themselves nevertheless confronted with compelling psychodrama. From December, also at the National, the Chicago based Steppenwolf Company presented August: Osage County, trailing awards and plaudits from its continuing Broadway run. Tracy Letts’ August is an exhausting and hilarious three-hour black comedy in which the audience is invited to observe a Midwestern family reunite in the aftermath of the disappearance of their father. Here, vile, tragic, Violet Weston, a drug addled matriach, decides over a funeral supper that it is “just time we had some truths told ‘round here’s all” and in so doing repels all around her and invites them to “stick that knife of judgement in me, go ahead, but make no mistake… When nothing is left, when everything is gone and disappeared, I’ll be here. Who’s stronger now, you son-of-a-bitch?!”.

Even avoiding straight theatre, for a psychiatrist, won’t guarantee escape from Axis I and Axis II disorders. At the Royal Opera in the Autumn, Strauss’ Elektra left audiences stunned at Klytaemnestra’s blood curdling cackles, hearing that her son is dead and can no longer assist his sister in seeking revenge for the murder of her beloved father. In the spring, in Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt, we see a young man haunted in grief for his late wife Maria. Elsewhere, at the Hackney Empire, the English Touring Opera are in rehearsals for Janacek’s, Kat’a Kabanova, with sexuality, shame and suicide set to a stormy score.

Among recently opened musicals, Spring Awakening at the Hammersmith Lyric, is a show which adds rock music inner monologues to illustrate Frank Wedekind’s once banned play about teenage sexual urges in an oppressive and uninformative upbringing. Sunset Boulevard, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s stage musical adaptation of the classic movie, might be said to depict a woman with many Cluster B traits and, tipped soon to transfer from Broadway, is a highly lauded revival of Gypsy, in which a Mama Rose disastrously projects all her own aspirations into her daughters.

So I have given a list of examples of plays, operas and musicals that might form an eclectic cultural agenda for a London psychiatric trainee this year, but how might these be perceived as a syllabus or source of clinical inspiration? Perhaps as a series of case studies, and of, admittedly fictional, recreations of more complex dynamics and systems than doctors usually see in a consulting room or A&E cubicle.

In his book Scenes of Madness, Professor Derek Russell Davis concludes that through theatre, there is much we can discover about psychiatric illness and practice, notably that plays offer the playgoer, as an observer, the chance to put behaviour “into a context of events, circumstances and their connections”. We also learn that “intervention from outside by a mediator” especially one with subjective, intuitive, understanding can help the characters gain resolution. This intuitive understanding is gained, “when the playgoer sees the meaning in the behaviour through empathy with the person afflicted”.

In the theatre we’re also free to express and explore counter-transference, whether as a gasp, cry, tut or tsk, or to laugh in a way which would have the PALS office pursuing us were we do to so in the workplace. There’s also the added insight into the intrapsychic world of stage characters in the form of soliloquies, arias and solos, which might allow us to speculate similarly as to the conscious and unconscious motivations of our own patients.

I’m not sure MRCPsych examiners will be posing questions on Hamlet (Donmar West End, Wyndhams, from June), King Lear (Young Vic, Feb – Mar), or Blanche DuBois (Streetcar Named Desire, Donmar Warehouse, from July) but I’ll be in the audience hoping for both entertainment and insight for my own practice.