American Idiot, Arts Theatre, WC2
reviewed for The Times, 23 July 2015
Amelia Lily and Aaron Sidwell in Green Day’s American Idiot
(Photo credit: Marilyn Kingwill)
George W. Bush, of course, was the original American idiot. Green Day’s 2004 album, American Idiot, was the anti-war movement’s hopeless howl, the music of choice for suburban adolescents with barely a prospect but to rage against the machine.
Bush still haunts the pre-set of this theatrical adaptation of the album, grinning at us from screens as we take our seats, but he’s refreshingly absent for the next 90 minutes. Instead, the band’s frontman, Billie Joe Armstrong, and the show’s original Broadway director, Michael Mayer, weave Green Day’s soulful punk into a surprisingly nuanced, haunting progress through the white-trash landscape of Bush’s America. (“The land of make-believe that don’t believe in me”). In this London run, it’s set alight by Aaron Sidwell’s devastating performance as the vein-throbbing punk-boy Johnny.
The plot is as follows. Ranting one last time about his stepdad Brad, Johnny leaves town with his friend Tunny, although third wheel Will is trapped at home with his pregnant girlfriend (a superb Natasha J Barnes). In the big city, Johnny wanders the streets. A dreadlocked fair maiden (Amelia Lily) casts him a glance from her concrete tower; he raises his guitar to her like the noblest of troubadours, strumming Armstrong’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams.
Tunny loses his way more quickly and signs up for military service (the Green Day number Favourite Son becomes the ironic chant of a bitterly camp all-American recruiting video). One year later, deadbeat Will looks set to raise the next generation of screw-ups, Tunny is a discharged amputee and Johnny is in a spiral of sexual jealousy and addiction, injecting heroin on stage at a particularly visceral moment.
If it’s flimsy as a narrative, it’s no less a snapshot of our times. American Idiot was named to mock the false starry promises of American Idol — there’s an irony in seeing it now as a vehicle for the X Factor “discovery” Amelia Lily. Lily is better at sultry flirting and deep-powered singing than she is at emoting drama; each pose of frustration suggests the cackle of a Scooby-Doo villain. However, Johnny’s struggle with his “new friend” St Jimmy (played by Lucas Rush), a dark figure of heroin and chaos, is a rake’s progress in the richest morality tradition. Affecting and unsettling.
