NEVER MIND THE MOUNTAIN, OVER THE ROAD CHICHESTER ROCKS
Now here’s a perfect gig for us 1970’s leftovers, though I suspect today’s young rockers will also love the shiny leather pants off it. For it has everything for today: female friendship defying patriarchy, protesters with placards on the streets decrying poverty and monarchy, and a condemnation of male profiteering on the talent and looks of young women. Oh, and some storming rock numbers old and new, by Howard Schuman and Roxy Music’s Andy Mackay. Dominic Cooke and musical supervisor Nigel Lilley rather brilliantly do not allow them to stop the story dead by running them too long (the main fault, remember, of Standing at the Sky’s Edge). Sometimes just a verse or an introduction or reprise hits us as the tale of three women gallops on. We want more every time, and then get it as the story evolves.
The play is Chloe Moss’ spinoff from the famous 1970s TV series ROCK FOLLIES, an event for which people hurried back from work in order to share several series’-worth of the saga. It tracked the fortunes of three young women forming a fictional rock group – as friends, not manufactured-assembled products like the Spice Girls. It was a time when despite the US Supremes and Ronettes, British girls were expected to be backing acts for male rock gods. It mesmerized people: those who were around then were positively a-quiver with excitement on spotting the flaming locks of one of the originals, Rula Lenska, and next to her the series’ creator, the real Schuman.
We meet our three first as they stomp out of a rude director’s tired chorus line in spangled pink boxer shorts, and resolve to do their own thing. There’s Zizi Strallen’s “Q”, who lives with a parasitic no-hope bodybuilder and does ooh-Mr-Milkman porn films, albeit with lot of “beige Lycra between us”. There’s Angela Marie Hurst’s Dee who lives in a very ’70s commune in a squat, all menstruation-haikus and chakras, and Carly Bawden’s Anna. She is posher than them, went to Cambridge, writes songs and has a patronizing husband who reckons she’s “more Susan Hampshire than Suzi Quattro”.
And off they go: all great movers and glorious voices ( Hurst is truly remarkable), falling in with sweet gay Harry (Samuel Barnett, a delight) as their musical director, and falling out with their blokes. Though Stephenson Ardern-Sodje’s Spike does stick by Dee, after one lapse when another lass unblocks his chakras. The trio get gigs, exhaust themselves on lowgrade tours, audition for record labels and get discovered and bullied into fame by the agent Kitty (Tamsin Carroll magnificently scary in a 70s Purdey wig). She’s a sister at heart, but there’s also Fred Haig as nasty pink-suited David , who undermines them by shoehorning in Philippa Stefani as his girlfriend Roxy, while Dee struggles with her conscience over replacing harmonies, Q tries to mediate their weary rows (Strallen is fabulously likeable) and Anna hits the booze and coke.
It’s not particularly deep, but a fairytale rock epic from a past time which remains absolutely one for our own, and has some wonderful set-pieces. Gasp at Sebastian Torkia as a sort of satanic Jethro Tull wannabe who makes them be a backing group in cat costumes emerging from dustbins. Enjoy their defiance of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee: this may baffle the new generation, but we old salts remember all too well the punkish counterculture fury of that time which makes many of today’s genteel whining issues feel a bit wet (I make no judgement, but simply record the thought that went through my head at that particular moment). There are some lovely thoughtful, lyrical songs as well as rock stormers, and the ensemble and cast change costume in seconds to leap gloriously round the three women’s tale : as stylists, audiences, demonstrators, all flowing with energetic joyful speed. Serious fun.
Box office cft.org.uk to 26 August
Rating 4.
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