WISDOM IN A LIFE BACKWARDS
Forget the awful fim made from Scott Fitzgerald’s story about a life lived backwards – a man born in old age, working towards youth and infancy in reverse. Jethro Compton and the composer Darren Clarke have made of it the most touching, humane, magical and wise new musical of the year. It’s always good to see Southwark Playhouse’s finds transferring and growing big- west-endy – as did Operation Meatloaf. Equally transporting to see theatres full of every age – quite young last night, tickets go down past £50 here – warming to something genuine and different, with the sincerity of folk-music energy and humour in a spirited ensemble spirit. The last parallel was COME FROM AWAY.
Compton and Clarke have been seven years finessing this, and far longer thinking it through. That shows: so does the sense of community, the beloved ordinariness of smalltown life, this time in a Cornish fishing harbour. At Southwark it was more simply set and smaller, but now it has a fine seagull-haunted set with ropework and nets, most of it scavenged feom the real western coast, and a ladder up and down and around which the 14 actor-musicians scramble and caper with their instruments – fiddle, whistle, accordion, base, cajon, mandolin, cornet, trombone, assorted percussion.
Fine tunes and heartfelt unaffected lyrics drive on the story of poor Benjamin, who we see first as an old codger, decrepit in bowler and pipe, shut away from the world as a monster by horrified parents, looking through his attic window longing to “live a little life, feel a little freedom, see a little sea”. His mother’s grief before her suicide on the clifftop is wrenching and real, too. They may be stuck in an impossible fairytale curse, but the feelings are universal. And so it is all through, an unspoilt folk melodiousness and honesty in all of them: not least John Dalgliesh’s Benjamin , and Clare Foster’s marvellous clear sound as Elowen .
Thus a whimsically impossible tale becomes something that drills rapidly into real feeling, a real wondering compassion for all of us who whirl through our brief lifespans in the normal direction, womdering how to deal with it, being disbelieved, looki g for love and home. It takes little time for BEnjamin to become likeable, lovable even, as he escapes to the local pub , is dazzled by Elowen the barmaid – who finds 55 just the right age for a man – and, as he grows younger into middle age, gets a job on the trawlers . His relationship with Jack Quarton’s young Jack is endearing: his gradual winning of the (temporarily) much younger Eillowen irresistible. Their song about the moon and the sea breaks your heart, happily. The years roll by, recited by minutes and hours and seconds by the narrating ensemble: the second World War comes, he joins the Navy, finds love and has a son; always growing younger, kmowing it can’t end well. It almost doesn’t, then does, because that is how the best folktales end.
Around him the big cast caper and whirl, argue, and chorus, powerful observers, telling the tale, explaining how events create turning points nobody could predict. If I have one cavil about this glorious show , which deserves to run and tour like Come From Away , it is that it would be easier to follow some of the neighbourhood events – a bit under-milk-wood – outside the central life if they were spoken more than sung in tight exuberant choruses.
But it is the smallest of cavils and fails to knock off the fifth mouse. Because after a rushed day far from home I came out of it younger than I went in. Button magic. Or as he would sing, “a little part of this old heart is feeling young tonight”.
Theambassadorstheatre.co.uk To 15 feb
Five.
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