Soon after the start a ripple ran round
the auditorium, and by the end it had them standing in the stalls. I
know, I know, but it’s hard to resist gags like those. Mark Hollmann
and Greg Kotis’ 2001 Broadway hit is not as sniggersome about its
setting as the London fringe’s 1990s offering
Flush – The Musical, but it still
gets a lot of mileage out of obvious humour. Also out of genre parody,
metatheatrical observation and just about everything else that occurs
to it.
In a dystopian future, chronic water shortages are addressed by the
abolition of private toilet facilities. If you want to go, you go in a
public, corporate-owned “amenity” which, naturally, charges
exorbitantly. Then a hunky young attendant is radicalised by a swift
one-two: his father is sent to Urinetown (i.e. put to death) for peeing
other than in the place provided, and he falls in love with an
idealistic young woman who turns out to be the daughter of the big
corporate cheese. Cue riot in cistern block #9 (sorry again).
It’s a comprehensively knowing project. As well as the schoolboy
giggles, there are the musical allusions: even I could spot
pastiches/parodies of Brecht/Weill, Sondheim,
Les Mis and Kander & Ebb, and
I’m sure I missed several more. The tough cop narrator and his
little-girl interlocutor engage in discussions about what a musical
like this can and can’t do. It also dares to eschew a happy ending by
suggesting that the brutal measures imposed were necessary to ensure
some kind of regulated water supply, and namechecks political economist
and catastrophist Thomas Malthus. The thing is that this great gumbo
doesn’t amount to a mess. Obviously it could never succeed in its
entirety, either objectively or for any individual viewer; but there is
more than enough firing, on a number of levels, to keep pretty much
anyone engaged and stimulated.
Jamie Lloyd has long been known as a fine director of musicals, but
since his student days he has been drawn especially to more self-aware
pieces of this kind. He has assembled a fine cast, with Richard
Fleeshman as the young hero, Simon Paisley Day as the wicked breadhead,
Jenna Russell belting out numbers as the senior attendant (Urethra
Franklin? Sorry, sorry) and RSC stalwart Jonathan Slinger relishing his
sinister narrator role. For this relief, much thanks.
Written for the Financial
Times.