Whimsy from The Right Size YEN Gergiev raises a 50th birthday storm YEN Paradise Shostakovich
The Guardian - United Kingdom; May 5, 2001
BY MICHAEL BILLINGTON

Theatre Bewilderness Lyric Hammersmith, London

WS Gilbert once observed that an accepted wit has but to say 'Pass the mustard' and simple folk will roar their ribs out. On the evidence of this show, the comedy duo The Right Size have now reached that stage. Around me people yelped and guffawed; clearly in a minority of one, I cracked the odd smile but kept thinking the show wasn't nearly as funny as the couple's locked-in-a-bathroom epic, Do You Come Here Often?

It starts promisingly with two old friends enjoying a rustic reunion after 20 years. Terry (Sean Foley) is an ice-cream salesman; Maurice (Hamish McColl) is a smug, solitary lawyer. Wrapped in layers of brown paper, both look like ambulatory parcels. After hearing cries of help from the back of the sofa, they are projected into a vertiginous wonderland where they meet an old man (Freddie Jones), an itinerant magician-musician (Chris Larner) and a number of floppy dummies. The sustaining joke is that Jones can take only one of them back to the real world, which leads to much conspiratorial bickering.

Given that the show is inspired by the Narnia novels, I had hoped for much more specific satire; golden opportunities to have a go at CS Lewis's bluff piety and middle-class chumminess go begging. What we get, in effect, is a series of extended sight-gags. Much the best, all pre-recorded and screened, shows Foley stalking off stage in a huff, taking a taxi to Heathrow and ending up in front of the Egyptian Pyramids. Some of the other gags, such as McColl apparently decapitating Foley whose head then pops up through a trapdoor, are ingenious but will not come as a shock to any devotee of music hall.

The problem here is that the wobbly narrative barely sustains 90 minutes. Foley and McColl are at their best in extended situations, such as a pub scene where they confess their unhappiness, rather than in telling a story. I also wish they would push their comic personae much further, that Foley would be goofier and McColl more bullying. Classic double-acts, from Laurel and Hardy to Jewel and Warriss, have a streak of sado-masochism that these two shy away from. And, while I'm carping, it's odd how sex barely features on their agenda: how much more interesting it would be if they met a female recluse in the forest rather than the amiably bearded Jones.

None of my comments will matter a jot to hardcore Right Size fans, who will obviously have a ball. But what disturbs me about this show is that it celebrates, rather than satirises, whimsical playfulness and appeals to a nostalgic infantilism that these days seems all the comic rage. Michael Billington

Until June 2. Box office: 020-8741 2311.

Classical Philharmonia/Gergiev Royal Festival Hall, London

The Royal Festival Hall opened its doors 50 years ago on Thursday. Celebrations for the anniversary continue through the weekend, but the birthday itself was marked by this gala concert, given by the Philharmonia Orchestra under Valery Gergiev and attended by the capital's great and good, as well as the Prince of Wales.

The hall itself is showing its age, but it had been decked out for the occasion: the casework of the organ formed the imposing backdrop and floral pillows decorated the boxes, with a kingsize floral duvet in front of the royal box. A fanfare specially commissioned for the occasion from Harrison Birtwistle launched things - a miniature of piercing intensity ushered in and closed by the sound of a tam-tam, and building to a typically gritty, hard-won climax that was more than simply celebratory.

Pierre-Andre Valade conducted that premiere, but Gergiev was in charge for the rest of the evening. If you want a conductor to raise a storm on occasions like this, then Gergiev is definitely your man. The theatrical charge that he brought to Beethoven's third Leonora Overture was electrifying, compressing a whole opera's worth of drama into its 15 minutes; the Philharmonia provided razor-sharp responses to his batonless flutterings. The accompaniment to Schumann's Piano Concerto was similarly sculpted in bold, passionate gestures, though Murray Perahia's performance was less emphatic: beautifully finished and poetic, but lacking in excitement.

The second half was given over almost entirely to Verdi. Gergiev topped and tailed the sequence of arias with the overtures to La Forza del Destino and I Vespri Siciliani, performances of such overwhelming physicality that the vocal numbers in between almost paled by comparison. Angela Gheorghiu sang numbers from Forza and, for no obvious reason, from Catalani's La Wally; the tenor Marcello Giordani chipped in with chunks of Luisa Miller and I Lombardi; Dmitri Hvorostovsky contributed Rigoletto's great outburst and a heartstopping presentation of Rodrigo's death scene from Don Carlo. High-octane, high-calibre singing, even if it was not quite what the Festival Hall is famous for. Andrew Clements

A version of this review appeared in later editions of yesterday's paper.

Opera Paradise Moscow Grand Theatre, Leeds

Shostakovich consigned his only operetta, Moscow, Cheryomushki, to his personal B-list. The composer went so far as to beg his friends not to attend the premiere of a work which, in a dark moment, he described as 'boring, feeble and stupid'.

Those are not words that leap to mind after seeing Opera North's new production. Renamed Paradise Moscow, this is a reorchestrated, expanded version of the 1994 Pimlico Opera production arranged for small band by Gerard McBurney. It uses director David Pountney's incisive translation - a vast improvement on the stilted original. Add McBurney's keen instinct for theatre scoring, Craig Revel Horwood's inspired choreography and an outstanding cast, and you have one of Opera North's finest creations in years.

Paradise Moscow is not an operetta in the strict sense: it has a fast-moving dialogue and song-and-dance routines more reminiscent of vaudeville. Pountney has exploited this magnificently, especially with regard to his villains. Barabashkin (Campbell Morrison) oscillates between sounding like a deranged sergeant-major and a likable Bob Hoskins, while Vava (Margaret Preece), the boss's conniving girlfriend, has a wonderful cockney screech unnervingly reminiscent of Terry Jones in Life of Brian.

Moscow, Cheryomushki was the gentlest of satires on Soviet life, but Paradise Moscow is a fully blown send-up, with the cavorting figures of Lenin, Stalin and Marx making a memorable appearance. KGB men pop up repeatedly and irrelevantly, more ridiculous than sinister. The extent to which Pountney has revised the libretto is especially blatant when Masha and Sasha compare reactions to the sound of a doorbell: Masha's memories - innocent in the original - are of feet on the stairs, limousines in the streets and a suitcase kept packed by the door. It felt slightly overdone. But there can be little doubt that Shostakovich would have loved this production - he might even have added Paradise Moscow to his A-list. Pauline Fairclough

Until May 12. Box office: 0113-222 6222. Then at Sadler's Wells, London EC1 (020-7863 8000), from May 23. Theatre Woyzeck Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh

It's 'like the world's died', says Woyzeck, early on in Buchner's unremittingly bleak study of human suffering and inhuman cruelty, newly adapted by David Harrower. And so it is in Neil Warmington's stunning set design, which has just the right atmosphere of lurid nightmare. A swirling stormy sky, the colour of a bruise, forms a menacing backdrop as the play opens; a dead tree sits beneath it. Houses are like watchtowers, covered in black plastic and rope, just like the murdered body found in the opening moments. In a fairground scene, about as jolly as the play gets, a blind woman carries a bunch of black balloons, a crowd gathers round a human freakshow. It all looks murkily perfect. It sounds right too, with John Irvine's maddening score - like bursts of the most jangly bits off piano from Bowie's Aladdin Sane - amplifying Woyzeck's anguish.

When Buchner was writing the play in 1836 (a year before he died of typhus, aged 23), never had a man been so put-upon in drama, except in Shakespeare and Greek tragedies. Buchner's radical move was to make his central character an ordinary man, a soldier and father to the child of a prostitute. Existing in a world devoid of compassion and untroubled by any sense of personal loyalty, Woyzeck is subject only to the physical and emotional taunts of others.

There are many fine things about this production: aside from the evocative set and music, Harrower's adaptation is clean and clear, and there are impressive performances from Helen Lomax as Marie and Neil McKinven as Woyzeck. But for all that, there is a chilliness at the heart of the play, hurdles that prevent us fully engaging with Woyzeck's misery. Some scenes are little more than expressionistic, symbolic fragments. But the production is also sometimes at fault, particularly in the presentation of the doctor. He uses Woyzeck as a subject for his bizarre scientific experiments (a diet of peas for two months), and to play him as a camp comic presence fatally undoes the terror of these scenes.

But this is worth seeing for the remarkable design and as a reminder of how precociously radical Buchner's vision was (you can see the debt Strindberg, Brecht and Beckett owe him), even if Woyzeck's plight ultimately leaves us rather cold and, like everyone else in his world, uncaring. Elisabeth Mahoney