UK Edition
Review
A dark-hearted Christmas treat - The Grinning Man, Trafalgar Studios, review
This is boom time for the pocket-sized British musical with big aspirations. Already this year we’ve seen the Old Vic’s Girl From the North Country – Conor McPherson’s plangent, soulful reimagining of Bob Dylan’s back catalogue – and Sheffield Crucible’s pop-tastic Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, now in the West End. And now comes this pungent, grimacing fairy tale, which premiered at Bristol Old Vic last year and which is directed by Tom Morris, still known most for his global smash hit War Horse.
It’s based on an 1869 Victor Hugo novel, but that hardly helps locate the darkly enchanted fairground territory into which this show plunges.
It’s the story of Grinpayne, an orphan who as a boy was scarred forever when an unknown assailant carved a smile onto his face. He’s been brought up by a puppeteer who both loves and exploits him, parading him for money as a freak-show attraction, alongside his blind, adopted sister Dee with whom he has fallen in love. Yet Grinpayne is also determined to the point of obsession to find out who cursed him with a life of pain.
Morris immerses the audience deep in a ghoulish, carnivalesque aesthetic. Designer Jon Bausor frames the small wooden stage with an open, leering mouth. Knock kneed percussion and nifty double bass provide keening, eerie accompaniment.
And if Grinpayne is a freak then, as the show not so subtly points out, he is scarcely any more so than the oddballs and misfits that surround him. Julian Bleach’s scheming clown manservant Barkilphedro slithers and slides like a creature from hell. The deliciously revolting, decadent royal family, coiffed and preened like figures on playing cards, consists of an incestuous brother and sister (an excellent Amanda Wilkin) and a mute queen in waiting.
Morris and his musical collaborators Tim Philips and Marc Teitler walk a high wire act of jostling, heightened tonal registers that don’t always fully harmonise. Carl Grose’s incident-packed narrative is prone to the odd confusing lurch. There is the nagging sense that the show’s magnificent gothic theatricality is at the expense of the more fable-like nature of the story.
But the show is also punctured by shards of sardonic, subversive wit. There is a clever emphasis throughout on alternative ways of seeing, as well as a spectacular puppet grey wolf, all slinky, skeletal body and bared, grinning teeth. And the final, desperately moving moments put me in mind of the reconciliation scenes in Shakespeare’s late romances. A dark-hearted Christmas treat.