mmmh interesting.


thank you!

Thank you for the contributions so far!

Front Row on Radio 4 did a review this evening - it begins at 17.24 in the broadcast and finishes at 29.00. They think the songs are a bit samey and difficult but beyond that it's hard to work out what Tahmima Anam, especially, thinks is the problem is with them. 'An honourable defeat', summarises Tom Sutcliffe.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001y8j0

Hindering, rather than helping, are PJ Harvey’s samey, dirge-like, soporific songs, which do nothing to advance the action or reveal the characters’ inner lives.

It’s a calamitous shame PJ’s Harvey’s score doesn’t conjure the faintest semblance of vitality. A bloated concoction of subdued power ballads paired with painfully superficial lyrics are such a tagged-on afterthought that the production couldn’t just go on happily without it, but would actively improve if it were abandoned.

Her songs intrigue at first, their lyrics both blunt – “this is a story about Lundun” chant the cast in the opening number – and esoteric. But as the story gets more interesting and the characters richer, the songs remain the same – character stands centre stage and sings out at the audience – until you can’t help sighing a little when another one strikes up, knowing another dirge is on its way.

Harvey’s ceaselessly repetitive, deadeningly slow rhythms and mostly stolidly unchanging harmonies – unhelped by Powers’ flat, earnest lyrics – never make a case for songs being in the show whatsoever.

London Tide review: A dirge – but what did you expect?
London Tide at the Lyttelton Theatre: ★★★★

“Every writer of fiction, though he may not adopt the dramatic form, writes in effect for the stage,” Charles Dickens announced in 1858. In the case of his particular style of fiction – lengthy, originally serialised novels crammed with characters and complex plots – this is especially fitting.

But is it fitting to lob in avant garde blues punk? Well, yes, although Dickens would surely be a little aghast at this new adaptation of his last and least popular novel, Our Mutual Friend. It introduces the disquieting music of PJ Harvey to devastating effect. Her songs, always dour and atmospheric, help transform the text into something new, doing a spectacular job of conveying emotions that would have been difficult for the characters to express without stalling the pace of the story.

Now here’s a bracing new way to do Dickens: avoid sets full of Victoriana by keeping the stage pretty much empty beneath a set of uneasily moving lighting-bars evocative of a tidal river. Cut out all the harrumphing Cheeryble rhetoric and lovable Peggotying; choose a late, least-familiar novel and get Ben Power to fillet the meaning out of the story in short scenes, as he did with the Lehman Trilogy. Then find a modern , eerily original and hypnotic songwriter – PJ Harvey – to set thirteen songs for individuals and whole-cast chorus at moments of high emotion

I suspect Ian Rickson’s production , based on Our Mutual Friend, will be, as they say, Marmite. It’s over three hours long , lacks set-piece glamour, has no desire to razzle-dazzle you, and Bunny Christie’s strange set of moving bars of light overhead may be downright unsettling until you see it as reflections from our ancient uneasy estuary.

But it is a sort of weird masterpiece and exactly what the NT should be doing. I was drawn into the idea of the murky old river-life of the London Thames from the moment the cast (21 strong) scrambled singing from the downstage pit and Jake Wood’s Gaffer Hexam – a plank representing his boat – found a drowned corpse, picked its pockets as was his way, and towed it home while his gentle daughter Lizzie (Ami Tredrea) began narrating their world.