Desperate Measures at Jermyn Street Theatre, SW1
reviewed for The Times, 30 November 2015
Desperate Measures (Photo credit: Tristram Kenton)
What if the Sixties hadn’t kept swinging? Britain had a sexual revolution, but not everyone was ready for it. So the lyricist Robin Kingsland and the composer Chris Barton imagine an all-too-plausible reactionary coup in this musical take on Measure for Measure.
Simon diAngelo, MP, woos votes from the Mary Whitehouse constituency, though the gangster Terry Pompey’s political salon looks more like Stephen Ward’s. There’s plenty of mileage in the concept, but Barton’s awkward vocal lines do this novice company few favours, and such was the unequal range of weak-chinned talent on display at Banter Productions that I began to worry that I had accidentally wandered into the Eton-Roedean sixth-form show.
Saving us, in every sense, is Ellie Nunn (yes, daughter of Trevor) as Isobel Feather, soon to become Sister Catherine. She’s plummy voiced, a little mannered, but it doesn’t matter: Nunn radiates charisma and emotional intelligence. She’s matched by Charlie Merriman’s fevered, onanistic diAngelo, and in their mutual, conflicting quest for spiritual purity there’s a rare modern sympathy here for a sense of sanctity lost, of salvation just beyond reach. It’s odd, then, that there’s something decidedly 21st century about Merriman’s retro crusader, salivating and spitting out his soundbites (“Westminster has lost touch with what real people think”), like Rowan Atkinson possessed by Tony Blair.
There’s little catchy in the score, and most of the cast struggle vocally, although Alice Jay, as a pregnant Sixties siren, catches at the heart in her prison duet with Isobel’s condemned brother Milo (Jojo Macari). Elsewhere Angharad George-Carey rolls her rrrs superciliously as the stagey politician Lady Escalus (when will companies learn that turning Shakespeare’s blandest bit-parts into women doesn’t solve his gender problem?).
The script is similarly uneven. Buried deep is a real sensitivity to the imagery of Shakespeare’s original, though we sit through limp debates on decriminalising prostitution and endless clanging couplets. Nunn and Merriman impress — but I’d rather see them tackle the real thing.
