Well, after the encore I think I’m now
excused banjos for the rest of my life. Surprisingly, the old
kerplunker was not written into the 1963 musical solely for the benefit
of original star Tommy Steele; the protagonist of H.G. Wells’
Kipps: The Story Of A Simple Soul
(1905) is himself an unregenerate plucker. And this version at least
gets a lot of mileage out of it, including a second-act number set at a
society soiree which ends with one chap literally swinging from the
chandelier.
A few of David Heneker’s songs have been cut, with the remainder
re-ordered, re-purposed and augmented by new numbers by George Stiles
and Anthony Drewe; Beverley Cross’s script has been replaced with one
by Julian Fellowes. (This is the team that gussied up Cameron
Mackintosh’s revival of
Mary Poppins
a few years ago, and will this autumn unveil a new musical version of
The Wind In The Willows.)
The creator of
Downton Abbey
is a natural choice for an Edwardian story about class consciousness:
draper’s assistant Arthur Kipps comes into money and has to choose
between shabby-genteel Helen with her appallingly snobbish family and
childhood friend Ann. Whichever way the story resolves itself, it’s
going to feel dodgy in 2016: it will either peddle the myth of social
mobility or suggest that happiness lies in knowing one’s place. Wells
opted for the latter, with which I suspect milord Fellowes is more
instinctively in sympathy. His script is fluent, though not without a
clutch of the anachronistic turns of phrase for which he is known in
some quarters. The songs are for the most part jaunty, to say the least
(this is the show that gave us “Flash, Bang, Wallop”), with the new
Stiles & Drewe numbers fitting well amidst the repointed originals.
Rachel Kavanaugh directs stylishly, and in Charlie Stemp has a lead
actor as given to a bit of a vigorous cavort as was the young Tommy
Steele. It’s fluff, of course, and the kind of fluff whose appeal
largely depends on whether or not you buy the kind of social
complacency in which even a fervent Marxist character dreams of nothing
so much as his own small business.
Written for the Financial
Times.