Les Misrables may be good, but it shouldn’t promise to save SA theatre, writes MARK GEVISSER
LES Misrables offers a vexing conundrum. How is it possible for a production to be such a smash hit when its plot is so arcane, its rag-clad chorus so unglamorous and its tunes so unhummable; when its stage languishes in a perpetual half-light completely at odds with the gotta-dance-gotta-sing bright lights of Broadway?
The answer, perhaps, lies in the fact that it creates a new and challenging aesthetic for the operatic musical while playing right into the age- old codes of Broadway. Creators Alan Boublil and Claude-Michel Schnberg squeezed out of Victor Hugo’s 19th-century masterpiece a classic rags-to- riches parable; one that gives the illusion of class conflict and social transformation but that should, accurately, be subtitled: Lose the War, Win the Girl.
At the end of the first act, the Communards, waving their red flag of freedom, build a barricade as startling in its originality as their song, One Day More, is rousing in its intensity: Hope, Freedom, The Future are all within grasp. Come the second act, and the imperial forces make short shrift of the insurrectionists: most of them die before our very eyes, except for our two heroes — Marius and Jean Valjean (see pic: Stig Rossen as Jean Valjean in Les Misrables)
But all’s well that ends well. Marius gets to marry Jean’s daughter, the urchin-turned-ingenue Cosette; Jean gets his redemption, finally excused for stealing a loaf of bread; and everything ends at a fabulous wedding feast at which even the evil Thnardiers are disarmed into light relief.
If insurrectionist Marius were more interested in revolution than Cosette; if he had won the battle at the barricade or settled for the rag-clad fellow- revolutionary Eponine rather than the now-bourgeois Cosette, you can bet Cameron Mackintosh’s last dollar that Les Mis would have bombed horribly, even if it was performed in full stagelight and was full of catchy Lloyd Webber jingles.
The on-stage barricade becomes, ultimately, a symbol of the impassability of theatrical convention; a new and daunting proscenium. On the one side of it is this gallant troupe of revolutionaries, the performers. On the other side of it is, well, us — the paying public.
At times, because of Les Mis’s ingenious lazy-susan stage, we are afforded the possibility of being behind the barricades — with the revolutionaries. But this is the theatre, remember: the lazy-susan does its full circle, and deposits us squarely back in our velvet-upholstered seats, smug and sated, cheering the cast at its curtain call.
There’s much to applaud. Mackintosh was correct when he boasted, on stage at the end of the opening-night performance, that the production we had just seen was Broadway-standard.
See Les Mis for its meticulous technical precision; for Ma-Anne Dionosio’s effortless and translucent performance as Eponine; for the comic subversion that Andrew Pole and Donna Lee provide as the Thnardiers; for Stig Rossen’s vocal range as Jean Valjean; for the dark, shadowy landscapes that are thrown across the stage and the way the performers inhabit them — at times burnished and statuesque, at times kinetic and martial. There’s a play between stillness and movement, on this stage, that is breathtaking and unique.
But Les Mis at the Nico promises much more than simply a good night out: it promises to do no less than save this country’s dying theatre. The presence of the production is, of course, beneficial to South African theatre — in the same way that broadcasting the BBC’s Middlemarch or Pride and Prejudice would be beneficial to South African television: not that it develops our own culture, but that it shows us a model of excellence and entertains us.
Mackintosh mentioned, in his comments on opening night, that there were Cape Town actors in the cast too — and pulled two little girls and one little boy forward to be applauded. The little boy particularly, Sivuyile Ngesi, was notable as Gavroche, the Stompie Seipei of Les Mis: his ability to sing contrapuntally, even if slightly off-key, brought a welcome surge of energy and even roughness to the otherwise too pitch-perfect affair.
These kids, Mackintosh said, were the future. He’d have no problem producing an all-South African play, he said, as long as there were performers as good as this cast was. The kids thus became, on stage, the representatives of South African theatre: childlike apprentices to the world-class act standing behind them. It was infantilising and patronising, and made one understand why Mackintosh got the goats up of the Performing Arts Workers Equity so strongly four years ago.
Mackintosh — together with local partners Pieter Toerien and Richard Loring — needs to be commended for bringing a model of theatre to this country that proves (unlike Loring’s Sound Stage) that live performance does not need to be vapid to be popular. But Mackintosh needs to be reminded that Athol Fugard is, with Pinter and Miller, one of the three contemporary greats of world theatre in English; he needs to be reminded that, within its own conventions, the musical theatre of Mbongeni Ngema is as proficient — and as popular.
It’s quite true that we could not launch a local production of Les Mis here — we don’t have the specific talent; we couldn’t afford it. Do we want the international Les Mis here? Of course we do. Do we need it to boost attendance at theatre and present an image of excellence? Undoubtedly. But there’s no real need for Les Mis, as a commercial product, to be Good For South African Theatre. All it needs to be is good. Cameron Mackintosh is a capitalist; he should not pretend to be a missionary.
Les Misrables runs at the Nico Theatre in Cape Town until September 22