Michael Grandage is not just an adroit
director but also an astute programmer. His revival of Peter Nichols
and Denis King’s 1977 play with songs, opening his West End season as
it does in the pre-Christmas period (and eleven years to the very day
after his Donmar production of it starring Roger Allam), seems at once
to offer an alternative to pantomime and, with a beefy man in drag and
a succession of unsubtle double entendres, to continue the spirit of
panto by other means, even though the setting of a British military
concert party in Malaya during the Emergency of 1948 is a world away
from panto fairy tales (oo-er). And, of course, Nichols’s skill as a
playwright is in pulling off a broadly similar achievement to that of
his
A Day In The Death Of Joe Egg, namely to Trojan-horse profundity in through an ostensible structure of cheesy entertainment.
Simon Russell Beale knows that he is not just ludicrous when dragged up
as Carmen Miranda or Marlene Dietrich, but a tad implausible even in a
tuxedo delivering a pastiche Noël Coward number. His character’s very
style of gayness (he even swears, “Jessica Christ!”) is of an
antiquated kind that collaborated with discrimination as much as it
defied it. Yet what Beale also knows is that this out-of-step figure (a
civilian given honorary military rank for service purposes) also turns
out to be the viewpoint character. The fellow we begin by identifying
with, newly arrived honourable innocent Stephen Flowers (Joseph Timms),
becomes gradually assimilated by the army’s machinery and in particular
by the preoccupations and prejudices of the unit’s commanding officer,
a complacent muscular Christian. By the final scene, as the company
board the ship back home, all wounded in one way or another after a
terrorist attack, it is Beale’s Capt. Terri Dennis who emerges as the
real hero of the piece.
Virtually the entire company turn in performances that show a discreet
awareness of hinterland for their characters and the play as a whole,
from Angus Wright as the smug, drawling major to John Marquez as the
Brummie corporal who is not gay as such but, as an acquaintance of mine
once put it, is happy to help out in a crisis. As the title number
almost puts it, these are privates to be proud of.
Written for the Financial
Times.