A HAIR DO and a SHAVE

Up in town recently, I took the opportunity to catch up with some movies and shows. A friend rather unexpectedly proposed that we see Hairspray in its stage musical manifestation and with a certain becoming reluctance I agreed to escort her, despite the show’s cast being led by two of my least favourite performers, Michael Ball and Mel Smith.

It all turned out a little differently from expected. First, my friend got poorly and cried off, allowing me to buy a reduced price day seat in the front row, a vantage point she certainly would not have tolerated. I got to the theatre at 9.30am and found only four queueing ahead of me but within ten minutes there must have been 30 behind me. I had the distinct impression that everyone within earshot was seeing the show for the tenth time.

Second, Mr Smith has already left the cast, even though it only opened four months ago. I think playing a few weeks just for the reviews is poor stuff. His place as Wilbur Turnblad has been taken by Ian Talbot, a perfectly unexceptionable pro of the old school. Third, Mr Ball gives the performance of his life. His abiding sin, vanity, is not appropriate to the role of Edna Turnblad, the heroine’s mother, which, since John Waters’ original non-musical movie of 1988, has always been played by a man (the late drag artiste Divine originally; Harvey Fierstein and a succession of others including George Wendt of Cheers fame in the Broadway musical; John Travolta in the movie of this second version of the material). Ball wears plentiful padding for the role but the arm flab and the multiple chins are entirely his own. He’ll need to take himself in hand when the run is over. Not much room for vanity there.

It would be a rare curmudgeon who was not charmed by this confection. I suspect that, had you been in a position to glance my way at pretty much any point during the proceedings, you would have caught me with a silly grin on my face. It is wholly good-natured and energetic and the musical score, utterly unmemorable, serves its purpose and offends none. The company is a good mix of handy types and they still play it as if it is the gypsy matinee in the first week of previews.

Mel Smith apart, every lead has won an award. Leanne Jones, the proudly tubby juvenile, Tracy, picked up the Olivier and a brief 6.00 O'Clock News profile a day or two after she won my heart. The yummy boy who, against the cliché, falls for her is Ben James-Ellis who, before he was obliged by Equity to assume the James part of his name, was the sole contestant in last year’s Any Dream Will Do to display any sex appeal (as my regular reader will recall).

The only number that disappointed me was Edna and Wilbur’s sentimental affirmation of their marriage, ‘Timeless to Me’, a perfectly decent little song but the occasion of a deal of ad-libbing and corpsing, led by Michael Ball. The audience falls on this kind of low-grade stuff with hysterical delight – I thought the two women behind me were going to have seizures – believing (I suppose) that it is real and uncontrolled rather than rehearsed and calculated. Think about it: is it likely that this song would suddenly make the performers break up just tonight when they’ve been singing it for four months? Wake up do. I sensed that I was the only person in the audience who didn’t buy this, just as I felt sure I was the only one who recognised John Waters as the voice on the on-stage radio (a little hommage, perhaps, to Mel Brooks and his momentary run-on during the early performances of The Producers on Broadway). But all in all this was a fine, old-fashioned Grand Night Out and the Shaftesbury, premature funeral parlour to more musicals than all the other West End houses put together, must be delighted to play host to one of its rare hits.

A considerably more substantial and significant musical is Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd and I steeled myself to see Tim Burton’s movie version, hopeful that Sondheim’s evident satisfaction with it and Burton’s proven track record of taking Grand Guignol seriously would militate against the indignities that so often befall musical plays when they go kicking and screaming before the cameras. The first thing to say is that a miraculous amount of the score is in place, rather more than is customary in filmed musicals. This was a nice surprise: the promotion has slyly downplayed that Sweeney Todd is a musical at all (it’s promoted purely as a Johnny Depp vehicle) and a couple of reviews I read suggested that some musical violence might have been done.

Not a bit of it. The movie looks sensational, like a mix of daguerreotype and animated Victorian woodcut, all silver and sepia with the blood picked out and a pair of sequences in bright colours, one a romanticised memory, the other a no less rosy projection. The acting is first rate. Depp can do no wrong in my book and his handling of the songs is masterly. His voice is nothing special but he completely understands the dynamic of sung drama and the way to handle a lyric, giving him the ability to act a singing role comparable to, for instance, Rosalind Russell in the movie of Gypsy. Depp’s gift for varieties of British accent is well known and for this one he has clearly listened to Paul Whitehouse and other brands of London speech.

Helena Bonham Carter’s career has clambered up to a much higher plane since she fell in with Burton and, while every Mrs Lovett I have seen on the stage (seven or eight now) was better cast and better able to find the level of the character’s comedy, she keeps pace with Depp. The only number that defeats the pair of them is ‘A Little Priest’. Neither has the requisite sense of comedy or feel for burlesque to convey the rollicking satire of this brilliant conceit and Burton stages it in a dismayingly literal fashion.

Alan Rickman is suitably malevolent as the cruel judge on whom Todd seeks his revenge, Timothy Spall runs through his familiar bag of tricks as the beadle, Sacha Baron Cohen is triumphant as the charlatan Pirelli and young Edward Sanders (a born Artful Dodger) has prodigious aplomb and musicality as Tobias. The juve leads are on the pallid side: Jamie Campbell Bower sings well as Anthony but looks disturbingly like a twelve year-old girl; Jayne Wisener’s Joanna has already fallen out of my memory but the character is anyway a cipher, for all that she is the subject of one of the most hauntingly beautiful songs ever written.

Keeping up the blood level, I also saw There Will Be Blood. Now that’s a movie. It’s a rural Citizen Kane and Daniel Day-Lewis is clearly channelling Welles as well as, for the surface detail, John Huston. His performance is nothing short of a miracle. It’s in the interstices, the throw-away moments, the quietness of what he does that, paradoxically perhaps, the genius of the work is most apparent. All of it is palpably lived by Day-Lewis. You never see the mechanics of it or catch him acting and yet it’s huge and authentically Victorian – gracious and courtly and watchful as well as brutal and hubristic and animal. He makes you care about this man even while you fear what he will do. This is one of the great monstres sacrés of cinema and one of the five or six greatest feats of screen acting you will ever see.

What I wasn’t prepared for is that, while the story undoubtedly and inevitably turns bloody, the blood it promises is much more in the sense of kin. This is very much a saga of family, of father and son, of brother and brother though, as is apparent from the outset, these kinships are all false. Indeed, my own reading of the identical twins Paul and Eli is that they are to be seen not as two people but as manifestations of a single split personality; the review in Sight & Sound declares that “the film ultimately refutes” this possibility but I don’t agree. As the saying goes, we never see them together.

I also caught Juno, a wholly fresh and seductive tale of a 16 year-old’s dramas. I was reminded of Jon Stewart’s funny line at the Oscars: “great movies this year but they’re so grim. Thank God for teenage pregnancy”. Diablo Cody’s screenplay richly deserved its awards – this was very much a movie whose success was founded on a sparky script – and Ellen Page’s preternaturally self-possessed Juno was absolutely riveting to watch, enough to make the young Lauren Bacall look like Margaret O’Brien.

I wanted to see No Country for Old Men, being a big fan of, on the one hand, Cormac McCarthy’s novels and, on the other, the Coen Brothers’ movies, but couldn’t fit it in. My host at the house where I was staying, who is in his 70s, said he couldn’t understand most of the dialogue and referred to it as No Country for Deaf Men. With him and his wife, I did see The Kite Runner at their local independent movie house but this was the least of my viewings. Its plot resembles that of Atonement which, for all that I know many detest it, is a far more achieved and honest movie and doesn’t conclude that the answer to the world’s problems is to come and live in the US of A, after a preposterous resolution of a kidnap in Afghanistan suggesting that anybody can be Rambo and get away with it. By and large, local movie-makers do a much more convincing job than western ones who visit and expect to get it in one, even if they are working (as in this case) from a native story.

Elsewhere in the theatre, I went to a matinee of The Sea at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. This is the most accessible of Edward Bond’s works and the first to reach the West End: it’s amusing that it should surface in this most conservative of houses and play an audience of grey heads all, it must be said, listening intently and largely appreciatively. It helps to have someone as accomplished as Eileen Atkins leading the cast. I have also seen Judi Dench as Mrs Rafi and Coral Browne who was its first player – as they say these days, she “created” the role – but I think Dame Eileen is the best. She understands at what level this is a comedy (I’ve never thought that comedy, for all her reputation for fun and larks, is Dame Judi’s forte) but never loses sight of the political underpinnings. David Haig began a bit broadly for my taste as her protagonist, the well-named Hatch, but he settled to it and handled the descent into madness with great skill. Jonathan Kent has become a fine director with a gift for clarity and self-effacement and for blending a company of talents who look unlikely to cohere.

I saw two plays in what we used to call fringe theatres, largely because I have a four-handed play in the market now and venues of this size and kind are the most likely to look upon my work kindly. Neither play was remotely world-shaking and one was simply awful so I shall get depressed if my effort is not thought worthy to be mounted in such company.