Tina review – whirlwind Turner tribute leaves you breathless

This terrific show is billed as the “untold” story of Tina Turner. Given that there has already been a bestselling memoir called I, Tina, a popular biopic starring Angela Bassett and even a jukebox musical, Soul Sister, the claim looks a little exaggerated. But this version, which comes with its subject’s blessing, offers a heady celebration of triumph over adversity and boasts a whirlwind performance by Adrienne Warren that left the audience, though not the star herself, breathless.

The book by Katori Hall, assisted by Frank Ketelaar and Kees Prins, dwells on Tina Turner’s extraordinary tenacity and ability to overcome life’s obstacles. Born Anna Mae Bullock in Nutbush, Tennessee, and loving singing in Baptist choirs, she learns to cope with her parents’ separation. Teamed professionally with Ike Turner, whom she eventually marries, she has to endure the horrors of serial abuse. Divorced and striking out on her own, she initially pays a heavy financial price and, as a 40-year-old woman of colour, suffers rejection by a record industry dominated by white men. As the world knows, however, she went on to achieve solo stardom.

While recording Tina’s troubles, the show is anything but a sob story since it is a tribute to her gutsiness and drive. I’d have liked to have heard more about how her Baptist upbringing and Buddhist conversion sustained her during the dark times, but Tina’s travails are always offset by the glories of the music. What is striking is the way the songs – and there are 23 of them – are used in a variety of ways. Sometimes they are there to advance the narrative, as when Tina steps into the breach in the recording studio and rescues a session by singing A Fool in Love.

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At other times, they demonstrate her capacity for reinvention: in River Deep, Mountain High she follows Phil Spector’s injunction to stick to the melody rather than relying on the kind of aggressive fervour encouraged by Ike. Only once did I sense a clunking cue for a song when Tina, talking to a sympathetic marketing man, superfluously enquires “what’s love got to do with it?”

But the show rests on the shoulders of Warren, who is rarely off stage and who is simply astonishing. Above all, she captures the fact there is not one Tina Turner but several. Warren shows how Tina develops and changes as a singer and how, in moving to rock stardom, she retains her ferocious energy while introducing occasional notes of plangent melancholy. Warren also conveys Tina’s growth from stoical victim of Ike’s cruelty into a woman of defiant confidence. On top of all that, she dances up a storm in a way that had the audience on its feet even before the curtain call.

The tricky role is that of Ike, and Kobna Holdbrook-Smith skilfully counters his monstrosity by suggesting that he never got his due as a pre-Elvis rock’n’roll pioneer and that he was a product of a culture that encouraged male swagger: you don’t like Ike but you begin to understand him. That, however, is the mark of a production by Phyllida Lloyd that is both intelligent and consistently good to look at. Mark Thompson’s design uses projections to create a whirling panorama of America, Bruno Poet’s lighting evokes the empurpled skies of Tennessee and the softer registers of a Monet-like Thames and, not least, there is the choreography of Anthony van Laast, which ensures the show is in perpetual motion. As bio-musicals go, this is as good as it gets.