Review The Wind In The Willows

The Wind In The Willows
A musical based on the novel by Kenneth Grahame
Book by Julian Fellowes
Music by George Stiles
Lyrics by Anthony Drewe

Country Diary Of An Edwardian Banker
https://www.windinthewillowsthemusical.com/

During the halcyon days of TLT's childhood, the sun shone forever above the ancient horse chestnut tree and dappled with its rays the parish school windows where the thrushes on the sill with throbbing breasts warbled their little hearts out.

Then the kindly schoolmaster took down from the wooden shelf The Wind In The Willows and read in rich and vivid tones a fresh instalment of life on the river bank to a rapt young audience.

The boys were dressed in caps and shorts and the girls in their gingham pinafores, all in a classroom comradeship with little Theresa and Jeremy clutching each other's small hands for comfort when the story took a darker turn.

Ok, ok that was almost complete fantasy ;)

However TLT's teacher did read a chapter a day at her state primary school. For hard as it is to imagine in our time of invasive weaselly mobile phones and computers, we  lapped up nourishing literary meals with Mole, Ratty and Badger while Toad, we thought, had a kinship with our own cheeky "naughtiest boy in the class".

Now a jolly musical version of Kenneth Grahame's classic, with music by George Stiles and lyrics by Anthony Drewe and book by Julian Fellowes, has brought the fight to preserve the status quo between the river bank and the Wild Woods on to the London Palladium stage.

Green fronds descend as the river bank comes to life on Peter McKintosh's ingenious tree ring set filled with concentric wooden circles for the rural landscape in contrast to the expressionist Toad Hall decorated with Louis XVI decadence and attended to by long-eared white rabbit flunkeys.

Craig Mather and Simon Lipkin make an engaging bespectacled West Country mole and streetwise water rat respectively - although somehow we realise their personas know their way around a mobile phone.

Julian Fellowes' book is pretty good and more or less faithful to the source material.

Yet there's a brisk modern slickness to director Rachel Kavanagh's staging which doesn't reflect the deeper resonance of the novel and its recognition of seasonal change and sense of troubling undercurrents.

Grahame himself had previously worked as Secretary to the Bank Of England where he was the victim of a bizarre assassination attempt. Not long after he took early retirement and wrote his most famous book which became a success after President Theodore Roosevelt was given a copy and lobbied for its publication.     

Maybe it was deemed too soon, hot on the heels of the Stiles/Drewe/Fellowes additions to Half A Sixpence (although the river bank musical was written first) to style the show as purely Edwardian. So there's also a 1950s and 1960s vibe sometimes reminiscent of the Ealing Studio comedies.

We have pencil-skirted air hostess swallows, even if the soprano trills of One Swallow Does Not A Summer Make are pleasingly from an earlier era.  The garish chief weasel (an excellent Neil McDermott) is a mid twentieth century spiv, surely Soho-based with his continental taste for pizza?

This takes somewhat away from the strange mix found in Grahame's tale and the drawings of the novel's most celebrated illustrator Ernest H Shepherd and into the realms of Disney.

While we wish there was a little more adventurousness and lateral thinking as to how to invoke and evoke the atmosphere of the novel with its thread of the supernatural, unease and potential savagery  in the costuming and staging, if we didn't know the book, we would accept the musical on its own terms.

Gary Wilmot is the stern Badger, with the tartan tie of a Laird but the authoritative English accent of a retired military man  of course has a fine set of lungs introducing a thematic, if somewhat all-purpose song, A Friend Is Still A Friend.

There are times when we wondered if we were on the threshhold of Jerome K Jerome's Three Men In A Boat and Beatrix Potter tales but, sadly, never quite the weirdness of Grahame's Edwardian literary soulmate in mysticism, Saki.

But wait a moment, why are the headlights of TLT's automotive companion all a-gleam? Any adaptation of The Wind In The Willows must stand or fall by that prolix, blustering, egotistical but loveable road hog (to mix our animal metaphors) Mr Toad of Toad Hall.

Rufus Hound revs up and swings into action and gives good value as the menace on four wheels. It's all pretty efficient and the children seemed to love it (we asked a few in a post-show totally unscientific straw poll).

For us Kenneth Grahame's novel still colonizes our imagination.We did wonder if its conjuring up of a pastoral benevolently feudal river bank where mole and vole know their place with their homely unmortgaged holes might be enough for some to cheer on the weasels and the stoats in their attempted coup.

Nevertheless we were suckers for the prickly but endearing family of Baden Powell scouting hedghogs threatened by the motor car with a nod to Gilbert & Sullivan in The Hedgehog's Nightmare  and the delightful field mice with cute traditional wassailing chorals.

A friend is still a friend and a colourful and gently entertaining show is still an amber/green light show! 

Review The Braille Legacy

David Wilkins is a blind and partially deaf print and broadcast journalist who has worked in South Africa and for the BBC in Guernsey and Lincoln.  https://davidwilkinswords.blogspot.co.uk/

The Braille Legacy
Original idea, French book and lyrics by Sébastien Lancrenon
Music by Jean-Baptiste Saudray
Translation by Ranjit Bolt 

A Touch Of Genius
http://charingcrosstheatre.co.uk/theatre/the-braille-legacy 

Louis Braille pioneered a touch system of raised dots which revolutionised the education of the blind, enabling them to read and write as well as their sighted peers.

As Louis was also a gifted vocalist and musician who invented the Braille music code, a musical would seem to be an extremely appropriate way to celebrate Louis' legacy.

The unique story of Louis' remarkable achievement by the age of 15 allows composer Jean-Baptiste Saudray and book and lyric writer Sébastien Lancrenon to use an approach and style in The Braille Legacy beloved by fans of Lionel Bart's Oliver and Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg's Les Miserables.

Losing his sight in an accident when very young, Louis becomes a pupil at a workhouse-like cash strapped Parisian boarding school for blind children in the early 19th century.

He is eager to read but the few books available at the school are in embossed print, making it enormously difficult for the blind children to read at all. However merely airing these frustrations in public results in a ban from France's National Library in Paris.

Yet he overcomes his despair and adversity hardens his resolve to find a way to learn and fight the injustice he encounters. Braille has to battle against the bigotry of both individuals and the state, as well as the difficulties of persuading his school to accept the Braille system as an alternative to print.

Inspired by a retired army officer's system of reading messages in the dark devised for soldiers,  Louis is determined to pioneer his own system - still in use by blind people worldwide after 200 years.

The Braille Legacy is based very loosely based on the inventor of Braille's true-life story. Jack Wolfe is a sympathetic proactive Louis telling his own story through song.

Directed by Thom Southerland, The Braille Legacy's narrative is simple, direct and affecting and includes the obligatory tragic hero and villain. Louis' chief ally is Jérôme Pradon's Dr Pignier and his chief adversary Ashley Stillburn's Monsieur Dufau.

Dialogue acts in a supporting role and the music conveys the characters' deepest feelings. The musical as a whole is heartbreaking but leavened throughout by a sense of comedy. And in the end the audience is left with the impression that the good guy won.

But - and it's a big but - The Braille Legacy as a musical presentation of the Louis Braille story is also deeply flawed. The most blatant flaw is that the entire cast are sighted, but telling a story about blind people.

Obviously it is too much logistically to expect a production to hire an entire cast of blind performers. Nevertheless I would contend that, despite appreciating Jack Wolfe's superb performance, a blind performer with equal singing and acting talent would have been more convincing simply because he would understand what it is to be blind and, just as importantly, how blind people are treated by others, adding a more truthful dimension to the performance.

For somebody who has never been blind, it's impossible to truly understand how it feels to be treated as a blind person.

The sighted actors wear blindfolds to convey they cannot see, removing them when they bond with each other and upon the invention of Braille. This is a clever device making a tangible difference for the performers and showing there should be no exclusion for blind people.

However it also puts the sighted audience at a distance from the action, giving it an abstract quality, rather than including them in the world of the blind.

The Braille Legacy also sometimes veers too much away from the life of Louis to make general points regarding disability instead of letting issues emerge organically from the particulars of story.

Again, while appreciating musicals need to have some dramatic licence and simplification, this musical tells a tale that was too black and white. This significantly weakened the plot and at times made the story difficult to believe.

Monsieur Dufau’s view that blindness is a disease to be cured, principally by surgical intervention,  doesn't reflect the true story and is unconvincing.  I was also frustrated that after Louis invents Braille, he effectively melts into the background, becoming a minor character.

The musical then foregrounds a story of blind children vanishing for fiendish experiments and inserts what appears to be an argument about whether blindness should be understood as an illness or a simple variation of the human condition.

This unbalances a musical that begins well with an exploration of Louis Braille's unique story but has a weak and unconvincing finale.

Those who have seen The Braille Legacy may be pleased to know there were never any experiments to find "a cure for blindness" at the National Institute for Blind Youth.  Monsieur Dufau did exist but no children vanished from the school when it was under his care.

Of course The Braille Legacy is a fictional dramatisation, never intended as an accurate portrayal of The National Institute for Blind Youth in 19th century France.  I still enjoyed the performances and the rousing and touching songs.

I cannot ignore the lack of visually impaired and blind actors and believe the musical's book to be sometimes misguided. Yet this musical also powerfully conveys the legacy of Louis Braille and the debt the blind population owes to him. I give an amber light for a flawed but invigorating production.

Review The Braille Legacy

The Braille Legacy 
Original idea, French book and lyrics by Sébastien Lancrenon
Music by Jean-Baptiste Saudray
Translation by Ranjit Bolt

Joining The Dots
http://www.charingcrosstheatre.co.uk/

The story of Louis Braille of the eponymous punched dot system of reading and writing for the blind is a fascinating one. Not only as, in musical theatre terms, a triumph over tragedy story. But also for the the blind as the nexus of philosophical, political, professional and medical vested interests in France during the 19th century

If this sounds heavy going, it doesn't need to be and there is plenty to enjoy in the new musical with book by Sébastien Lancrenon translated by Ranjit Bolt and music by Jean-Baptiste Saudray - as far as it goes.

For it feels like a piece shorn of context and we suspect essential aspects may have been cut to shoehorn the story into an "Anglo-Saxon" model of a musical.

In terms of musicals, it's a story which remains a curiosity with no love interest except if love of culture and learning and teaching counts as a love interest.

This also feels like a musical which has been put on with the basic elements in place but before a dramatic, entertaining way of explaining the particular political and intellectual circumstances swirling around Louis has been worked out.  

Louis Braille was born in the early nineteenth century when Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte was at the height of his powers and died young, just when Napoleon's nephew, previously president of the French Republic, mounted a coup d'état turning France into a hereditary imperial monarchy. So when a blind boy surprises a sighted Parisian recognizing by touch a coin as "a crown", there's a meaning. But frankly who would know?

The head of the Parisian school for blind youth is deprived of funds, called a "zookeeper" - the huge revolving white set from Tim Shorthall is  the centre of the menagerie - and the blind viewed as freaks.

Yet despite the dilapidated, filthy conditions, the school still gave the best education available to the blind. Against the odds and at a time of violent political turmoil, Louis pioneered there a system of touch writing for the blind allowing them not only to become students but. just as importantly, teachers.

The musical directed by Thom Southerland has only unexplained glimpses of the wider context  affecting Louis (Jack Wolfe). We learn that the French parliament is corrupt and of the fight between those who want to educate the blind and those who seek only to "cure" blindness by surgery, believing giving the blind an education to be a retrograde step.

This is principally shown in a philosophical heads-on between the chief of the Parisian school,  Dr Pignier (Jérôme Pradon), and an ambitious teacher Monsieur Dufau (Ashley Stillburn). Their struggle is characterised by the attitudes of 18th century enlightenment philosophers Voltaire and Rousseau. Yeah, those two, we all know what they represent, don't we?😲

Watching The Braille Legacy, TLT and her own automotive compatriote (vive le feu tricolore!) had the impression that something was missing or maybe had been cut. There's a stirring score starting with a habitual celebration of Paris, but with more context, the songs could almost be a satirical rejoinder to the heroics of French culture which had lofty ideals for the blind in theory but in practice subjected them to punishing regimes.

The ancient National Library Of France is flattened into a place from where Louis is thrown out. The role of the imagination, the inner life and resources of the blind is mentioned. However the opportunity to bring forth the ghosts of those philosophers, politicians and writers with conflicting views of the blind in a battle of the books with the potential for humor and wit, and the blind children at the centre, is entirely overlooked.

And yet there is just enough there for us to sense that there should be something more, even if the story is diverted into a series of more conventional conflicts: the hostile teacher ready to administer the cane and damage Louis's precious sense of touch; a struggle with fellow pupil Gabriel (Jason Broderick) and with the army captain (Michael Remick) whose "night writing" devised to help soldiers communicate in the dark was the initial inspiration for Braille.

The use of blindfolds to convey the physical state of blindness and the limitations put on the children seems to draw on a famous painting of First World War soldiers called Gassed where, blinded by mustard gas,  the men stand blindfolded in a line with a hand on the shoulder of the man in front.

The monetary burden on the state of paying pensions for members of the armed forces was indeed another reason why a surgical cure was the preferred route but the image alone cannot convey the commercial imperatives which could have added bite to the story.

As it is, another story concerning the children, which almost has the atmosphere of concentration camp experimentation, added in the second act only serves to underline an unevenness of tone and an uncertainty over the plot. 

Still, the band under Toby Higgins and epecially the choral singing of the cast gives power to the tale. Jack Wolfe is a winsome curly haired Louis Braile with a sweet tone to his voice while Jérôme Pradon makes a distinctive Dr Pignier.

The Braille Legacy gives clues that it is also dealing with France's image of itself in the light of  the Enlightment and Revolutionary ideals and its treatment of its blind citizens. It's just a pity more thought hasn't been given to more entertaining and ironic ways into the story.

Maybe this musical will still be given a chance with further development of the book to to match Jean-Baptiste Sauday's score and Thom Southerland's affecting and effective staging, but this appears to have been put on before it was ready. For the performances we give an amber/green light.