IN THE world of theatre, there's no genre so unpredictable as the much-abused tribute musical. Some of these shows, it has to be said, are among the real bottom-feeders of the live entertainment scene, cynical cut-and-paste jobs designed to bamboozle
some niche-market of fans with an overpriced mixture of weak musical performance and feeble narrative.
But then again, the tribute form can produce the occasional gem, the show that combines a real, loving respect for the music in hand with a true sense of theatre, and a story that reflects and expands the spirit of the music itself; and that, in a lighthearted way, is what has been achieved by writer Tim Firth, director Matthew Warchus, and the rest of the team, in this new touring version of Our House, the 2002 musical based on the work of the North London band Madness. As their many fans already know, Madness emerged from the mean streets of NW1 in the late 1970s, with a bouncy, complex, ska-influenced sound that flowered into a series of massive hits – including Our House (In The Middle Of Our Street), My Girl's Mad At Me, and the iconic school's-out anthem, Baggy Trousers.
What Tim Firth has done, though, is to take the powerful, distinctive English-pop sound of Madness and spin it out into a story that gives full expression to the values behind the songs, notably that trademark mixture of streetwise cyncism and underlying romantic-ism. And so – with bold echoes throughout of Willy Russell's iconic working-class musical, Blood Brothers – we find ourselves following a brave double narrative, in which our young hero Joe Casey (from Casey Street, NW1) faces a decision on his 16th birthday that takes him in two different possible directions, both of which we follow.
By the interval, it seems pretty clear that the boy who did the right thing, and tried to play it straight, has made a mug's choice; he is penniless and in prison, while his morally compromised other half has become a big-time property developer, right-hand man of the local Mr Big, and is married to his teenage sweetheart, the lovely Sarah.
But in the second half, fortunes gradually reverse, as the dark underbelly of the property development business begins to shadow the community, and the Joe who kept his hands clean gradually discovers the true meaning of happiness.
It's schmalzy stuff, towards the end, full of a simple anti-capitalist politics. But the earthy energy of the songs keeps the show from spilling over the edge of sentimentality, as does Peter Darling's Madness-inspired choreography which is witty and often brilliant.
And a superb young company – led by the quiet-voiced but completely convincing Chris Carswell as Joe, with Steve Brookstein as the guiding spirit of his dead dad, Miria Parvin as girlfriend Sarah, and a dozen more superbly committed young dancers and actors as friends, schoolmates and chorus – throw themselves into the show with an energy and passion that lifts the heart; and creates a true tribute to a band that once spoke for a whole generation of working-class kids in London and beyond, even as the class they came from was being swept away in a wave of social and economic change.
If Joe's story suggests, in a fairly straightforward way, that all that glisters is not gold, then Shakespeare's Merchant Of Venice – the play from which that quote comes – is a far more morally ambiguous piece of work.
To win the lovely Portia, heiress of Belmont, the cash-strapped Venetian gentleman-about-town Bassanio famously has to choose one of three caskets, gold, silver and lead; and as in Joe's story, the choice that leads to love is the least showy one, the one that asks for sacrifice.
In the background, though, lies the story of Bassanio's melancholy friend Antonio, of his obsessive love for Bassanio, and of his business relationship with Shylock the Jew, a money-lender for whom wealth has become a substitute for the respect and civic equality Venice denies him; and by the bitter end of the play, the sugary Christian moral-ising over the casket choice seems like fairly thin and decorative stuff.
For much of its length, Gordon Barr's outdoor production – the first of this year's Bard In The Botanics season – seems like a fairly conventional approach to the play, set in the 1930s so far as costume is concerned, but not heavily reinterpreted to fit the moment when anti-Semitism in Europe took on its most lethal and frightening form.
In the second half, though – once the romancing is over, and the logic of the court case between Antonio and Shylock begins to exert its grip – the production suddenly shifts into much higher gear, with Sarah Chalcroft's Portia taking on an impressive stature and complexity as she struggles to square her instinctive support for Antonio, her new husband's friend, with a deep sense that the Jew is suffering some fundamental wrong.
Towards the end, that unease finds expression not only in her increasingly fine performance, but in some marvellous use of Shylock's discarded skullcap and prayer-shawl as a symbol of Europe's Jewish heritage, despised and trampled by some, preserved and honoured by others.
It's not in the script, of course. But Barr and his company demonstrate that Shakespeare's great and troubling play more than bears the interpretation they bring to it; and the result is a final half-hour as strong and satisfying as I have ever seen in a production of The Merchant Of Venice, as the shadows of night creep across the gardens, and – on stage – across our whole continent.
• Our House is at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, tonight and tomorrow, and at the Playhouse, Edinburgh, 7-12 July. The Merchant Of Venice is at the Botanic Gardens, Glasgow, until 12 July.
The full article contains 1001 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
