PLANT FOOD PEOPLE FROM THE PAST
I missed this first time round, due to the babysitting years, so it was grand to catch up. It’s a 1980’s revival, a spoof on 1960’s sci-fi horror movies, with a lot of vigorous be-bop and early Motown. And what could be more Britain 2024 than a skid-row set with roving drunks and dossers, and a chorus of three teenage girls bunking off school hanging around by the bins beside a small shop in the process of going bust?
Inside the shop Mr Mushnik tells his staff it’s all over: there’l be no job for orphan Seymour, and poor Audrey in her form-fitting leopardskin outfits is sporting a black eye from her loutish boyfriend (what dates this piece is that this, and her subsequent broken arm”from the handcuffs’ is treated as a bit of a joke). Will she have to go back to working the clubs in “cheap and nasty apparel”, and leave Seymout jobless? But Seymour (a sweetly geeky Oliver Mawdsley) has been tending a new kind of Venus flytrap, a flesh-eating plant. Perhaps if they put it in the window, people might come in? They do.
Unfortunately, the lad’s cut finger reveals that the only thing that makes it grow – it leaps three sizes in the first half alone – is drops of human blood. Before long he is getting anaemic with the effort of keeping it going. But when you’ve got a really good and very hyper villain – Matthew Ganley as Orin the sadistic leather-jacketed raving rockabilly dentist, the plant’s first big snack is a no-brainer. He falls to his (nicely topical) dangerous nitrous oxide sniffing habit and the plant becomes an instrument of natural justice , wiping out the dentist liberating Seymour to woo the golden-hearted Audrey.
By this time the plant is 8foot tall and a very messy eater: credit to invisible puppetteer Matthew Heywood for good writhing , innards-sucking and flawless green lip-synch, and a salute to the terrifying baritone of Anton Stephans (a man who has sung with both Tina Turner and Elton). During the interval a set of screens goes up on the open stage, suggesting the happy certainty that the plant , named Audrey 2 by the besotted Seymour, may be even more enormous in the second half. And so it befalls.
The four co-producing theatres, and director Lotte Wakeham, do good honour to Howard Ashman’s gleefully ridiculous story, and even more to Alan Menken’s music. I could, do be honest, have done without the doo-wop chorus of three girls, though Chardai Shaw in particular is a grand belting voice. But Laura Jane Matthewson stops the show with Audrey’s plaintive dream about wanting a house and front garden “somewhere that’s green” . And her “Suddenly Seymour” duet with Mawdsley is actually properly moving, though by this time the lad is becoming the Macbeth of horticulturalists, seduced by agents and the promise of fame. It won’t end well for anyone. Shrieks of glee meet every demise. And when in the last preview two stagehands had to nip on and sort out a wobbly prop fridge, the plant displayed showed a gift for meaningful upstaging gestures which made us shriek even more. Maybe not for under-7s, nervous horticulturalists or dentists who take offence easily. But otherwise a cheering night.
At New Wolsey theatre, Ipswich, to 23 March.
Then TOURING, SEE BELOW
Rating 4
TOURING
Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, 27 March–20 April; Octagon, Bolton, 24 April–18 May
Hull Truck, 22 May–8 June.
theatreCat 