‘Les Miserables’

Press, 30 November 1987, Page 8

‘Les Miserables’

“Les Mlserables” by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg, based on the novel by Victor Hugo. Original French text by Boublil and Jean MarcRatel. Music by Schonberg. Lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer. Directed and adapted by Trevor Nunn and John Caird. Associate director, Gale Edwards. Musical director Peter Casey. Design, John Marier. Lighting David Hersey. Costumes Andreane Reofitou. Theatre Royal, Sydney. Reviewed by H. G. Kippax. The long-awaited Royal Shakespeare Company blockbuster, “Les Mlserables,” with an Australian cast directed by Trevor Nunn, received a standing ovation after the opening performance. That applause provided an appropriately enthusiastic overture to what will undoubtedly be a very long run. . The production, as such, deserved the applause. The scene and scale is riveting as it traverses the outline of Hugo’s epic story of expiation and redemption set against 20 years of turbulence of postRenaissance France.

Here is epic theatre of memorable technical virtuosity. The lighting alone is worth the admission money for the changing scenery, suggesting painters of the period ranging from David and Daumier to Gericault, explores the use of light and shadow to the limit The staging fills out these pictures with its compositions of heroic tableaux (the barricades of 1832) and the surge and swarm of its suffering or heroic humanity. Simply as a feat of sustained organisation it must be a peak in Nunn’s eminent career at Stratford and in London. For all these reasons I recommend it.

But (and there are going to be many buts from here on) if it is Hugo translated as quasi-opera you seek, you may well be disappointed despite all the theatrical excitement

As opera its music, though continuous, is niggardly with melody. There is not a bad marching song, a haunting little waltz and a good little scene for the comic villain. There is reasonably effective use of motifs to place characters and theme. For the rest the score is a mixture of vehemence and sentiment running a gamut from the lachrymose to the lugubrious.

As for the great Victor Hugo himself, you have standing in for him a kind of animated skeleton. This is a version of “Les Miserables” without his flesh and blood, without his mind and spirit. Let me explain. The main story concerns Jean Valjean, the old lag escaped from parole, who commits a theft, is captured and is then saved by the intervention of a saintly bishop. The bishop’s compassion redeems him. When next we meet him he is a good mah and a successful one, the mayor of his provincial town.

There his own goodness exposes his identity to the relentless policeman, Javert, and a main strand in the book’s complexity emerges, with the beginning of a long duel the man of

compassion and the man of duty. What do we get of this (and other) stories? Hugo’s spaciously prepared episode of the bishop, crucial to Valjean’s story, comes to us in two two-minute scenes presenting the encounter stripped down to plot essentials as simply an event A not very revealing soliloquoy by Valjean follows and from there we dissolve through the years to his posterity, followed by another two-minute event, his exposure. In such ways Hugo’s epic sweep is fragmented down to a mosaic of events and vignettes, above all pictures. In all this there is hardly a hint of the processes of cause and effect, of psychology, of emotion of the forces of economics, politics, and philosophy. Without such processes there can not only be very little of the essential Hugo, but very little involving drama of any kind. My complaint is that although this production repeatedly feeds the eye it starves the mind and spirit Its characters are cardboard cutouts posed for gestures. They are picturesque but utterly unmoving. A "Miserables” which stirs neither exaltation nor pity, nor even suspense, has got to be deemed miserable principally because it is a failure. What we are offered instead of a great work of fiction is comic-strip cartoon culture.

I could give many examples of its vulgarising over-simplifications. Perhaps the least forgiveable is its schematic use of pitch black and radiant white to show us bad and good and life and'death. Such cartoon effects are as banal as the rhymes and cliches of lyrics. Still, no doubt, a lot of people will get valid enjoyment not only from the show’s spectacle but also from its performers. They are good. My only big disappointment was the Valjean (Normie Rowe), a sketch lacking in stature and authority. But then Rowe’s task is made almost impossible because of the organisation of the musical’s story which limits him to functional appearances designed to link its episodes. Valjean’s goodness comes across only as a kind of repetitive piety as he goes about rescuing people or releasing them. He becomes a kind of Gallic brother. You will find nothing of the inspiring figure admired by Dostoyevsky and others. The successes of the evening are the Javert (sung by Philip Quast with a command that positively acts menace into the part); Barry Langrich and Robyn Arthur, jaunty as the detestable Thanardiers, here presented as comic relief; Debbie Byrne (briefly unfortunately) as the sacrificial Fahtlne, Marina Prior as her daughter, and Jodie Gillies acting believable pathos and humanity into the part of Eponine. There is good singing from Simon Burke and Anthony Warlow as the chief revolutionaries, and an endearing street urchin deliciously “old fashioned” in his sagacity from young Brian Rooney (sharing the part with Adam Lloyd.) Finally, congratulations to the chorus for their fine wdtft