The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button (Ambassadors Theatre, London)
Verdict: Mighty hearty
As Oscar Wilde lamented in The Picture Of Dorian Gray: ‘The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.’
This is also the theme of the cracking new Cornish rock musical, The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, based on a short story by the great American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald (which was turned into a film starring Brad Pitt back in 2008).
Fitzgerald’s tale of an American who lives his life in reverse, from 1860 to 1930, has been re-purposed as a mostly joyous, sometimes angst-ridden story of an old boy who enters the world — at the age of 70 — in 1918.
He grows up (or maybe down) in small-town Cornwall, marries the love of his life in his 50s, enlists for World War II in his 40s, sires children in his 30s and marvels at space exploration in his 20s.
Happily the story spares us the practicalities of giving birth to a 6ft, 70-year-old codger in a tweed suit (complete with bowler hat).
The cracking new Cornish rock musical, The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, is based on a short story by the great American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald’s tale of an American who lives his life in reverse, from 1860 to 1930, has been re-purposed as a mostly joyous, sometimes angst-ridden story of an old boy who enters the world — at the age of 70
The effect is not just joyful, but also epic and cinematic, catching Benjamin’s sense of innocence and wonder, along with his feelings of doom and dread
It can sometimes feel a bit like a slightly uncool trip to hicksville — but it has a mighty big heart
With a tremendous score that heaves and swells like the ocean, the musical is staged on a timber-frame dock which, in the circumstances, could be called quay-boards
Instead, it’s performed like a clamorous lock-in at a Cornish tavern, with a cast of 13 actor-musicians creating a biographical barn dance.
Can it also be a coincidence that the music, in a show written and directed by Jethro Compton, is also vividly reminiscent of outré 70s folk-rock band Jethro Tull? I think not. Darren Clark’s score assails us with just about every folk instrument you can shake a banjo at… including Jethro Tull’s dreaded flute.
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The effect is not just joyful, but also epic and cinematic, catching Benjamin’s sense of innocence and wonder, along with his feelings of doom and dread as a man with a secret he dare not share.
John Dagleish’s Benjamin is like a sweet old Bernard Cribbins, who remains childlike all his life — despite bouts of shame and self-pity.
Luckily, he is emboldened by a feisty, flame-haired barmaid (Clare Foster) — his one true love — in a story told in folksy archetypes. These include Benjamin’s halfwit friend Jack (Jack Quarton), fabled for mixing proverbs (‘plenty more girls in the sea’).
With a tremendous score that heaves and swells like the ocean, the musical is staged on a timber-frame dock which, in the circumstances, could be called quay-boards.
It’s a remarkable achievement, by the way: bringing this show into the West End from the Fringe venue of Southwark Playhouse, where it premiered last year.
It can sometimes feel a bit like a slightly uncool trip to hicksville — but it has a mighty big heart.
The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button runs until February 15, 2025; Kenrex until November 16.
Kenrex (Playhouse, Sheffield)
Verdict: A fist full of hicksville
Speaking of hicks, Kenrex (in Sheffield) is another rustic yarn which sees the extraordinary young actor Jack Holden play the entire population of Skidmore, Missouri.
It’s an astonishing staging of a true-crime story from 1981 about the unsolved murder of one Ken Rex McElroy. Known locally as Kenrex and built like an outside toilet, McElroy was a psycho living behind a barbed wire fence… with an arsenal of weapons and a pack of raccoon dogs. He made it his job to terrorise the people of Skidmore — a backwater’s backwater an hour’s drive from anywhere.
Kenrex racked up 21 indictments for serious crimes but never once went to jail, thanks to a slippery lawyer (think Bob Odenkirk’s Jimmy McGill from Better Call Saul). He even contrived to marry an underage beauty queen; and intimidated — or shot — anyone who got in his way.
But when he put a couple of bullets into one too many of the fearful townsfolk, it finally looked like the end of the road.
The story could be trimmed to increase tension, and its attempt to ponder truth and justice doesn’t really cut the ketchup.
It’s an astonishing staging of a true-crime story from 1981 about the unsolved murder of one Ken Rex McElroy
Written by Holden and Ed Stambollouian, who also directs, the show creates a memorable social microcosm on Anisha Fields’s set of billboard, steps, spool tape-recorder and microphone stands
Instead, what marks out the production is Holden’s performance. Each of his myriad characters has their own subtle mannerisms, accent and voice; talking over one another in bars, phone calls and church services.
The only thing missing is the menace of Kenrex himself. Mouth ajar, shoulders aslant and with ‘a real soft tread’, Holden’s bass-voiced villain didn’t quite chill my blood. But it’s hard not to be swept along by the other characters, as well as country & western songs composed and played live by Nick Cave look-and-sound-alike John Patrick Elliott.
Written by Holden and Ed Stambollouian, who also directs, the show creates a memorable social microcosm on Anisha Fields’s set of billboard, steps, spool tape-recorder and microphone stands. Add hugely atmospheric lighting and 3D sound from Joshua Pharo and Giles Thomas, and you can practically smell the dust that Kenrex finally bites.
Enthralling saga of simmering upper-crust emotions
The Forsyte Saga, Parts 1 & 2 (Park Theatre, London)
Verdict: Sublime storytelling
By Georgina Brown for the Daily Mail
Less is infinitely more in this highly charged staging of John Galsworthy’s family saga about inheritance — money, property, feuds, bad blood as well as good character — that passes from generation to generation.
Lin Coghlan and Shaun McKenna’s expert filleting of nine fat novels into a lean two-part marathon grips, whether or not you remember Susan Hampshire’s Fleur from the telly series in 1967 or Damian Lewis’s Soames in 2002.
The first part opens on a stage spare and bare but for Victorian red curtains and carpet and a few glass lamps, where Flora Spencer-Longhurst’s thoroughly modern Fleur Forsyte, in daring slacks and a Twenties bob, is our narrator, looking back at the family and the tangled relationships in which she had been born.
These were the bad old days when women, corseted and frilled, were regarded as property by their rigidly respectable husbands, dressed in black frock coat and resembling undertakers.
Less is infinitely more in this highly charged staging of John Galsworthy’s family saga about inheritanc
The first part opens on a stage spare and bare but for Victorian red curtains and carpet and a few glass lamps
In Josh Roche’s superbly performed, swift and elegant ensemble production, the emotions simmer
Devoured in two bites or one greedy gulp, this is the most enthralling, intense five hours I have spent in a theatre this year
Fleur’s father Soames (Joseph Millson, cold, pinched yet scorching with passion,a figure both hateful and pitiful) was married to Fiona Hampton’s bewitching, exquisite Irene.
He and his Forsyte relations are aghast when she and a visionary young architect, the refreshingly expansive Bossiney (Andy Rush, left with Hampton), fall madly in love.
A fascinated Fleur witnesses the frisson between them ‘like a sudden flare of a match in a darkened room’. Mercifully, she doesn’t see the terrible moment when Soames ‘possessed her against her will’.
In Josh Roche’s superbly performed, swift and elegant ensemble production, the emotions simmer — unspoken, comic and tragic. ‘Courtesy requires me to offer you tea, Soames, but I don’t think I will.’ Small exchanges speak volumes. Irene: ‘Why do you still want me?’ Soames: ‘Because you are still mine.’
Hot and cold lighting (Alex Musgrave) and an ever-changing soundscape (Max Pappenheim) deftly whisk the action from suffocating confrontations to awkward family gatherings to romantic bluebell woods where feelings are unbuttoned.
While the first part is a satisfying stand-alone drama, the second develops and enriches as Fleur, who is as entitled, obsessive and possessive as her father, preys upon Irene’s son Jon (Andy Rush again). With the tense inevitability of a Greek tragedy, Galsworthy reveals that ‘those who don’t understand their own history are in danger of repeating it’.
Devoured in two bites or one greedy gulp, this is the most enthralling, intense five hours I have spent in a theatre this year. Every second counts. A transfer is essential.
Until December 7.