SONDHEIM AND THE STYX
I last saw this 405BC Greek classic in Spymonkey’s version and found it – sorry – unfroggettable. Giant puppetry, a community chorus tap-dancing as frogs while Xanthias and Dionysos travel to Hades to clown-up Aristophanes’ tale about the god of theatre, worried about war and chaos going to Hades to bring back either Euripides or Aeschylus to save the world with heroic wisdom. This time it’s Stephen Sondheim’s take, though he was never quite happy with it as it ran too long and was launched in a Yale swimming pool where everyone got wet.
This is neater, shorter and dryer, and does finally offer beyond the laughs some wisdom. There’s a mass of artful theatre reference and jokes from the start, the amiable Dan Buckley as Dionysos instructing the audience Greek-style and Kevin McHale from Glee, on a London stage debut, as Xanthias his slave (“I prefer to say intern). Sondheim – with Burt Shevelove and bits from Nathan Lane – updates it so that that the playwright they first look for in Hades is George Bernard Shaw (the old windbag is serendipitously up West right now, with Mrs Warren’s Profession). In the end they do find him, Martha Pothen playing it barnstormingly, irritatingly intellectual-Irish in a baggy suit and big beard with famous lines like “All great truths begin as blasphemies. Amid the circle of dead dramatic colleagues we get his rants against Shakespeare as a vapidly ornamental, intellectually null stealer of plots. Which of them does the troubled world need most – the poet or the pragmatist? Which should Dionysos bring home?
But that all comes later – indeed in the last quarter of the show – when the pair fight a magnificent brawling quote-off, culminating in Bart Lambert as a gentle Shakespeare singing “Fear no more the heat o’the sun” as against Shaw’s St Joan at the stake. Before that we have the journey, Joaquin Pedro Valdes as a supercool Heracles in lionskin with the “Gotta dress big!” Number, a hilariously Yorkshire Charon the ferryman (Carl Patrick) declining responsibility on behalf of the River Styx Cruise Line, and some unexpectedly lovely songs like Dionysos’ lament for Ariadne and “Its only a Play”.
And oh yes, we have the frogs that torment the travellers: the limber, hyperactive chorus suddenly in terrible rubberized lips and lolling tongues, representing the lumpen mass, cynical inactive resignation, sucking the idealists down. “Ri-ke-ke-kek, Ri-ke-ke-kek – whaddya care , the world’s a wreck, Why’d’ya wanna break your neck? what the hek, ri-ke-ke-kek!”. They only get one scene, but make it count.
So does Victoria Scone as Pluto, god of the underworld in an Edna-Everage getup of marabou and spangles, receiving whoops of drag joy in praising Hell as a va-va-voom hot resort. So there are plenty of moments, and some real feeling, notably in Buckley’s anxiously well-meaning but preening Dionysos as he struggles to bring back wisdom and beauty and referee the final fight between Shaw and Shakespeare. Once or twice I felt it sag a bit – despite the crisp two-hours-plus-interval shape – but when those last scenes arrived forgave it everything.
And good for Southwark: who doesn’t thrill at the arrival of a rare Sondheim revival, done with merry energy and heart for £35, less if you’re young, old or unwaged? As young Kevin McHale, self-mocking on his UK stage debut down towards Elephant and Castle murmurs, “It’s not technically West End, but it’s cute”. It’s more than that.
Southwarkplayhouse.co.uk. To 28 june
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