![]() Thompson's most interesting angle - that these people are damaging themselves as much as us - is also the most exasperating. But it isn't the revelation that it would have been a couple of years ago: we've seen too much of these types and their machinations. It even does a good job of explaining short-selling with the help of a ketchup sachet. ![]() It has a uniformly strong cast and makes good points about this willy-wagging world, making ground-breaking use of Minstrels (the chocolates not the crooners) which has to be seen to be believed. It's crisply written and is incisively staged by Roxana Silbert. Set on the bond floor of a London investment bank, where a grim gaggle of traders jostles for position, Roaring Trade is the first credit-crunch play to hit the stage this year, though it's not the first satire on the money markets: 22 years ago Caryl Churchill's Serious Money brought a flock of red braces into the stalls. Now Steve Thompson's new play is here to warn us that the world of high finance is a grisly land which saps the soul. First David Hare's Gethsemane attacks New Labour when the project has imploded. There's a weird time slippage taking place in political theatre. Lionel Bart's show has an amazing string of contagious songs, but its display of frolicsome Victoriana belongs to another era: not to the 19th century, but to the 1960s. Billy Elliot has proved that the West End musical can be abrasive as well as buoyant that flight doesn't have to mean escape. The vividly grotesque Julian Bleach bends his body into a question mark as Sowerberry the undertaker as Dr Grimwig, he is a mouth on legs, with his teeth sticking out at right angles from his gums. There are glimmers of how Dickens could be made to register more sharply on stage. The Artful Dodger is always going to be more engaging: Ross McCormack, one of the three Dodgers, is bendy-limbed and savvy, and has a grin that reaches to the gallery. That's in keeping with the part but it's also a problem if you're meant to be the hero. Harry Stott, one of the three winning Olivers, is a decorous and sweet-voiced chorister: he looks far more at home in his Little Lord Fauntleroy velvets than in urchin rags. Jodie Prenger's Nancy is boisterous but strangely bland: she scarcely changes from one number to another. They don't make a strong case for selection by small-screen voting. On the other hand, there's the I'd Do Anything contingent. In a show which has become as familiar to most of the audience as panto, he is the Dame. He goes beyond putty to pouty when he puts on his tiara and plays around with his necklaces: "Hello pearl, meet ruby." He makes an identity out of insinuation. On the one hand, there is old-style TV stardom in the putty-like presence of Rowan Atkinson. What has already made it a commercial success - the advance ticket sales were a record-breaking £15m - is, of course, telly. He has the same choreographer, Matthew Bourne, who bowls the evening along with a rolling, stage-enveloping series of thumb-in-jacket, elbows-out set pieces.īourne, who also co-directs, gives the show considerable yeast. He has the same designer, Anthony Ward, who supplies pretty pop-up London skyscapes and lots of brown interiors. He has worked with some of the Mendes team. ![]() But his effect has been curtailed as his brief was limited: his task was not to re-create Oliver! but to re-stage Sam Mendes's 1994 production. Rupert Goold, a director of radical flair, who has brushed a lot of dust off elderly pieces, might seem a strong choice for reinventing Lionel Bart's hit 1960 musical. No more cardboard domes of St Paul's seen through fog. ![]() No more cheekiness and chirp and poke bonnets and big bellies. No more of a woman proving she's got a good heart by being bashed to death. ![]() No more swarms of teeny orphans banging their spoons on their porringers. ![]()
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