Review Gabriel

A Second World War drama which tackles the disturbing subject of the Channel Isles under Nazi occupation brings home to Francis Beckett the realities of resistance and collaboration. 

Gabriel
by Moira Buffini

Barbed Wire, Bravery And Betrayal
http://www.theatre6.co.uk/blank

Hitler did manage to occupy one part of the UK. Churchill decided that the Channel Islands were not of sufficient strategic importance to merit vast resources for its defence, and for most of the war, Channel Islanders were faced with the dilemmas and compromises which tormented the French.

White flags had to be displayed outside every home, and the only authority was whatever the Germans provided or permitted.  The island beaches became minefields surrounded by barbed wire.

Moira Buffini’s 1997 play Gabriel is about how one family survived and the dreadful decisions demanded of the matriarch Jeanne Becquet.

Turned out of her big family home which has been requisitioned by the Germans, she lives with her teenage daughter, her daughter-in-law and a housekeeper on a farm. They sell the farm's produce to the occupying troops, and she adds to their comfort by exercising her sophisticated charm on German officers.

Near the start of the play, Buffini produces one of the cleverest devices I have seen for giving the audience the background information it needs without lots of tedious and unconvincing exposition.

She has Mrs Becquet give all the exposition that is required in front of a German officer who she thinks speaks no English, laughing privately at how shocked he would be if he understood her

The most important thing we learn in this scene is that her daughter-in-law, who lives in the farmhouse with her, is a Jew.  Most of the Jews in Guernsey were evacuated before the invasion. However several remained, some of whom died in death camps.

The German officer, Von Pfunz, turns out to speak fluent English and to understand every word Mrs Becquet says.  Indeed, he is not a textbook bullying, brutal Nazi, but something much more interesting, and ultimately much more frightening: a sensitive, clever, erudite, brutal Nazi.

The final element in the play is a young man found washed up on the beach, unconscious and near to death. He cannot remember his name or anything about himself, and the family christen him Gabriel. 

Gabriel – the archangel Gabriel appears in both the Old and New Testaments, and is a figure in both the Jewish and Christian religions – leads the play into a sort of dark mysticism – which I personally found much less gripping than the very real events happening on the island of Guernsey in 1943.

This is a fine, thoughtful play which ducks no awkward questions, and provides no easy answers.

Yes, Mrs Becquet is both a collaborator and languidly, lazily anti-Semitic, but we understand and sympathise with her and her dilemmas and care about what happens to her.  Yes, Von Pfunz is a Nazi who thinks the presence of a Jew in the household is “a cancer”, but this is no pantomime villain; Von Pfunz is a complex and interesting character.

A pretty well perfect cast is led by two wonderful, heart-breaking performances, from Belinda Lang as a torn and compromised Mrs Becquet and Paul McGann, quietly thunderous as Von Pfunz.

Kate McGregor’s direction is sensitive and sure-footed, and the set she and designer Carla Goodman have come up with emphasises the chaos and uncertainty, how everything can fall apart in an instant.

I saw this at the Richmond Theatre before it went on its current tour to Liverpool, Eastbourne, Mold in Wales, Windsor, Guildford,  but it returns to London's Greenwich Theatre in May.  A green light from me: catch it if you can.

Review Exposure The Musical

Exposure The Musical

Book, Music and Lyrics by Mike Dyer 

Out Of Focus

https://www.stjamestheatre.co.uk/

For a musical about a photographer, Exposure  is curiously uninterested in photography. There's a hint of something here and there but it's never - please pardon the old-style film pun - fully developed.

The strapline is "Life Through The Lens" and we're first presented to embryo photographer Jimmy when  he's -well - an embryo.in an ultrasound image. A projected photo of  the baby in the womb, a photographic process not entirely without risk and pain itself, towers over the stage.

Nevertheless the backers of this new musical have taken the risk and may still feel the pain because this kind of insight and coherence is never followed through in Exposure.

The set design by Timothy Bird clicks open like a camera shutter onto an African landscape. It's a clever enough concept but gets entirely lost in the random scenes and grab bag of styles, stories and clichés which follow.

Jimmy's photojournalist Dad (Kurt Kansley) is in a drought-stricken African country where an aid worker (Jahrel Thomas) pleads with him to take photos to tell the world of a starving people's plight with hoardes crowded into refugee camps.

But the photographer crosses the line when he takes a photo of a rainmaking ritual conducted by a local shaman who along with his tribe believes a photo steals the subject's soul. Cue for a song maybe? A bit of simple research on the internet reveals real experiences of photographers  and ruminations of others on soul stealing  

But the songs have only the frailest connection to photography and any development of the story. We're always willing to give new writing latitude. But a musical progressing from Africa to a projection of a foetus in a womb with the buff topless Jimmy (David Albury)  emerging singing from the shadows after his father's death, part beautified Frankenstein, part Chippendale (wait a moment - we haven't reached it yet!) with the memorable lyric "A womb with a view"?  (EM Forster and Noel Coward must be groaning at the well-worn pun, as well as turning in their graves.)

And so it goes on. It's an obviously fine cast, directed by Phil Willmott, who give their all and in grappling with the unwieldy material rise as far as they can above it all.

To try and sum up the story - Jimmy is determined from his schooldays to become a photographer while his mate blonde Janet (I'd Do Anything's Niamh Perry) has designs to become a vocal superstar, but ominously chooses the name "Pandora's Box" for her combo. Cue a lively schoolyard routine (choreography Lindon Barr) which might fit well into a youth musical.

Roll on the years, and Jimmy and Pandora are now all growed up pursuing their respective careers but bound to "fixer to the stars" Miles Mason (Michael Greco) who locks Jimmy and Pandora into draconian contracts and  turns out to be the devil in disguise. One of the contractual stipulations seems to be that Jimmy should ride off into the twilight zone and photograph the Seven Deadly Sins.

Cue a totally off-the-wall underground Faustian parade of the Seven Deadly Sins. That's underground as in the London Tube with station puns ranging from Anger Lane to Lusting Bec. Plus a range of influences from Cats to Roald Dahl. And there's Jimmy's traffic accident, on the motorbike gifted to him by Miles after receipt of his soul, with a hospital scene like a cross between All That Jazz  and Angels in America. 

Oh and pregnant Pandora takes an overdose while her elderly sugar daddy is on the phone arranging for her to have an abortion while Jimmy has a love interest in a homeless Irish lass, Tara (Emmerdale regular Natalie Anderson), who sells angels made out of Coke tins on Jermyn Street..

Apparently the legacy of the never-mentioned archive left by Jimmy's late Dad isn't enough to sustain his son and pay the bills. Jimmy's life and exploitation by Miles Mason is played out with classic images from the Getty archive flashed before our eyes, but there's no valid exploration of the photographer's trade.

The superficial clunky clichés only serve to highlight the curiously dated view of photography where the paparazzi are still viewed as all-powerful with  no competition from amateurs with mobile phones. 

Sure it is artistically fine to have the father dressed like an old style war photographer of the Frank Capa/Don McCullin mode. 

However when the costuming (designer Carla Goodman) and make up have a far more interesting narrative than the book, it's a musical with the wrong zoom lens. So it's a TLT rare red/amber light, red for the musical and amber for the cast and musicians who do their best with a piece which should have stayed in the darkroom