Around the World in 80 Days at St James Theatre, SW1
reviewed for The Times, 7th December 2015
Image Credit: Simon Annand
Puck put a girdle round about the earth in 40 minutes. Phileas Fogg manage d it in 80 days, give or take the time difference. Fogg, of course, based his voyage on industrial age technology, not Shakespearean magic, and in Laura Eason’s adaptation of the classic Jules Verne adventure novel he remains a hard stereotype of the Victorian rationalist, mapping his life with mathematical precision.
Lucy Bailey’s vibrant, characteristically inventive staging makes the most of an acrobatic, accomplished cast. Yet it’s hard to warm to a hero who in the opening sequence fires a servant for bringing him morning tea at a degree off his favourite temperature.
Fogg’s circumnavigation is inspired by a wager set over whist at the Reform Club. Yet this pivotal scene is over in the blink of an eye, and Robert Portal’s dapper Fogg — clockwork brain and clockwork heart — exudes such mastery of the world’s meta-schedule that there’s little sense that he’s taking any risk. And here lies the problem with an otherwise cheery, entertaining family Christmas show: nothing seems to be at stake.
If you can let that go, you’ll enjoy Simon Gregor’s tricks as Fogg’s circus-trained French valet Passepartout — Marcel Marceau channelling Andrew Sachs. Anna Fleischle’s set delights as soon as we enter the auditorium, a subterranean inventor’s workshop taking the place of the orchestra pit. There’s an escapade on an elephant and even a good chance of catching a marshmallow if you sit stalls-centre.
It just all seems a bit easy. Any obstacle — whether losing Passepartout in the opium dens of Hong Kong or saving him from a Native American ambush — is solved before we notice it’s arisen. The latter scene is particularly uncomfortable, as the non-white supporting cast play old-school “Red Indians” and whoop around our terrified, primarily white principals. Fogg’s interracial romance with Shanaya Rafaat’s elegant Mrs Aouda allows Portal to melt a bit, but it seems too little, too late.
