Peter Viney's Blog

Music and Lyrics by Theo Jamieson
Book by Elinor Cook
Based on books by Enid Blyton

Directed by Tamara Harvey
Designed by Lucy Osborne
Katherine Rockhill- musical director
Theo Jamieson – orchestrator

Chichester Festival Theatre
Wednesday 2 November 2022, 19.30

CAST

Maria Goodman – George
Isabelle Methven – Anne
Louis Suc – Dick
Dewi Wykes – Julian
David Ricardo-Pearce – Uncle Quentin
Laura Denning – Aunt Fanny
Alisa Dalling – Timmy puppeteer
Elisa De Grey- puppeteer
Kibong Tanji – Rowena
Sam Harrison – Bobby

MUSIC
Elisa Boyd- violin
Claire Shaw – woodwind
Benedict Wood- Guitar
Matt Elliot – bass guitar / double bass
David Hopkin -trumpet / flugel
Rob Waugh – drums / percussion

SEE ALSO PAUL F. NEWMAN’s ARTICLE ON THE FAMOUS FIVE (linked) on this site.

It’s directed by Tamara Harvey of Theatre Clwyd, who next year will become joint director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, in a dual role with Daniel Evans of Chichester Festival Theatre … a good choice by the RSC, hard roles to fill for CFT and Clywd.

Many years ago we tried to write a Famous Five stage play, based on Five Go Adventuring Again on the grounds that it had no cliffs, farms, steam engines, rowing boats or islands and took place at Christmas which was a good prospect for theatres fed up of pantomimes. We wrote to Darryl Waters (her estate) and they told us to go ahead and wished us well (though they would want to vet the final version), but we got tied up in another major ELT project and never completed it. We have read every one of the series aloud to our kids, and I was proud of my characterisations. There was never a wetter Anne, a more Tomboyish (dare I say ‘butch’) George, a more public school head boy Julian, a dumber but solidly brave Dick, nor a more irascible Uncle Quentin or lobotomised and gentle Aunt Fanny. My first thought on looking at the advance photo above was, ‘Anne should be wearing a pretty dress, not shorts.’

There was a 1997 play by Stephen Crawford, (book, some lyrics) and Robert Dallas (composer) which toured for eight months and went everywhere. We saw it in Poole. It was simply called The Famous Five. That was a musical too, and they used three teams of children for the four kids, and used a trained dog for Timmy. It proclaims that it’s set in 1938 which is four years before Five On A Treasure Island, the first book. There’s a degree of sense – the early books were published in the war but don’t mention it. It focused on the adults, and I can’t recall detail, but Mr Roland the tutor was a character, and that’s from Five Go Adventuring Again, which was the second in the series. It was produced by the disgraced music impresario Mervyn Conn, which is why the writers get scant credit.

It’s very easy to send Enid Blyton up mercilessly. Looking at the cast list I cannot believe that Louis Suc was cast to play Dick. Surely that must have been the cause of some ribaldry at cast lists. Couldn’t he have changed his surname just for this? Then no review mentions it. So did no one else notice? Or is there an entire generation too humourless to mention it?

Yes, we’ve got them all. We also bought all of the TV series (1978-1979) on VHS tape for our kids, and replaced them with the 6 DVD box set for our grandkids. We have the 1964 black & white TV serial, Five Have A Mystery To Solve on DVD, remastered by the British Film Institute no less. We have the Famous Five annuals. We have the 100th Anniversary of Blyton reprint series which are clean and new for our grandkids (some of our originals are perhaps too valuable for sticky fingers). Do I consider myself an expert in Famous Fivology? Yes.

The Famous Five are intrinsically over-the-top. There is a fine line to be drawn. You definitely don’t want the way over the top piss-take of The Comic Strip’s Five Go Mad in Dorset or Five Go Mad on Mescaline, but you also can’t (or shouldn’t) do it po-faced. Even in the 1950s when I first read it, I could detect the OTT nature of some of it: the interminable high teas with lashings of tongue and ham, or the lordly way Julian addressed the servant classes. Emma Rice’s version of Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers would be a good template.

The first issue is how do you do the fifth member, Timmy the Dog? Is it an actor in costume (Dick Whittington’s Cat, or Nana in 2016’s Peter Pan Goes Wrong)? Is it a real trained dog used minimally (the 1997 play)? Here it’s a puppet.

Another issue is costume. Is it 1940s to 1950s, when the books were written and illustrated by Eileen Soper? Or late 70s like the TV series? Or now? I would have gone for 1950s, but would I be aiming at my own nostalgia rather than directing it at kids in 2022? This one is set now.

This is a new story, not an adaptation of one of the existing, and devotes attention to how the five got together.

The positives.

The four young actors in the Famous Five are physically well-cast and give it tons of energy. The heights are right. The faces are right. Uncle Quentin looks the part too. For modern dress the costumes work, except for Anne.

The musical arrangements are intricate, well orchestrated, well-played.

The lighting design and lighting plot is very good indeed.

The manipulated Timmy the dog is well done.

Having musicians wander the stage is a nice touch.

The tickets were priced low to encourage families.

That’s about all for the positives.

The negatives

We did not go with pre-teen kids, so our judgment lacks their input. Note that. No one was aiming the play at us, though a wise producer – like Emma Rice with Malory Towers – knows we old farts are tempted to see Blyton so buy adult tickets and turn up with a bunch of grandkids. The new Famous Five books have weedy bland cartoon kiddy covers. These may set preconceptions. I prefer Eileen Soper in the 50s or the photos in the 70s.

This is Blyton revised to fit a tick box culture:

• Gender. George was always breaking stereotypes in the original, which was a major part of the appeal, but in contrast, Anne was the passive stereotype. Thirty years ago, our kids knew that Anne’s girliness – her love of dollies, making tea with saucers and spoons, and creating harmony were meant to be FUNNY. The difference emphasized George. Not any more. Anne takes over much of the leadership from Julian who is now indecisive and insecure, no longer the alpha male leader.
• George is psychologically traumatised (challenged?) by her dad’s obsession with work, in preference to time which could be spent better in discussing feelings with her. He will apologize and try to be better in future.
• Aunt Fanny might still be devoted to turning out piles of tuck, but at the end her reward is to become empowered as a celebrity cookbook author.
• Ecology is the sledgehammer theme.
• Kindness and forgiveness rule. i.e. Blandness rules.
• The dog was always a hero, back in the days when dogs ate leftovers happily, and people didn’t insist on taking their dogs into restaurants and having them manicured and groomed at great expense. In today’s dog-centric world, that is even more important. Timmy was a muddy dog always ready to savage a foreign spy by leaping straight at his windpipe.

You can’t have a musical without a single song with a memorable melody or half-decent lyric. Our kids and grandkids can still sing the theme tune to the 1979 TV series, We Are The Famous Five. The songs here are sub-Disney, but no, not that good. We both really disliked the songs, which in a musical is a problem. The songwriter is a superb arranger / orchestrator. Stick to it. You’ll always have a living. I advise going across the road to the Minerva and watching Local Hero. Mark Knopfler is in a different league as songwriter. He understands how do musicals. Songs complement the emotions on stage. Song lyrics are NOT essential narrative. You can semi-speak and add a melodic chorus. Melodic themes should be reprised. Above all, there must be melodic themes.

In the programme Theo Jamieson lists his influences from Sondheim and Lin-Manuel Miranda to ELO to Flaming Lips to Benjamin Britten. Really? Maybe in the textures of the backing, certainly not in the songs. Kibong Tanji as Rowena is a terrific singer, powerful, tuneful, but even she can’t get much from her big Act Two song.

Maria Goodman as George puts tremendous verve into sub-standard material. We felt sorry for the singers. This is material for bawling out words, not singing.

Then there’s the plot. Uncle Quentin has discovered renewable energy from seaweed, The villain Rowena is working for Avarice Oil (yes, sorry, sledgehammer subtlety, Avarice Oil) and kidnaps George to force her / him / them to hand over the secret plans for algae power which will save the world, so Big Oil can then lose them forever. These plans are touchingly inscribed in a traditional exercise book, not on a computer, memory stick or phone. This book made of paper contrasts with projected computer graphics of algebra formulas. Rowena will blow up the four kids with TNT packed together on what seems to be two suicide vests if Quentin refuses to hand the plans over. Fortunately it’s averted when Rowena gets Aunt Fanny’s recipe notes instead and Timmy cancels the imminent explosion.

The happy ending has a picnic – obviously it can’t be ham and tongue in case any vegans faint in the audience, so it’s sticky toffee cake from the Aunt Fanny recipe book. It looks just like Mr Kipling iced bakewell tarts with a cherry on top to me. Rowena is forgiven at once for trying to murder Quentin’s daughter plus his nephews and niece horribly, even though she did press the button to kill the lot, and she is given her old job back with Quentin.

So why is Rowena so annoyed in the first place? She had worked for Quentin who “shunned” her thus wrecking her academic career. Shunned? Yup, the pre-teens should empathize with that.

The concept, so the plot and book, is atrocious.

We buy quantities of children’s books, and we want to save the planet too. However, this year it’s an inexorable message browbeating kids as soon as they can listen to a story. The bookshops are full of high-minded, humorless dull eco-propoganda. How to be kind is a major theme. We longed for Enid Blyton’s ‘shifty foreign agents’ and ‘secret weapon plans’ and ‘smuggled goods,’ Sometimes algae as energy just doesn’t make a story. It’s about as interesting as a conversation with algae.

There is no humour at all. We guessed Sam Harrison’s multiple roles as Bobby are supposed to be funny. They’re not. The hats routine was dire.

Much as we liked Timmy The Dog, other puppets (rabbits, a sheep) weren’t necessary. I suppose they were a justification for having a puppet Timmy. The flying bird on a pole reminded me (with a shudder) of Principal Edward’s Magic Theatre wafting about in 1970, but that’s a personal hang-up.

I thought it misguided to give Aunt Fanny and George Mummerset-lite accents which drifted in and out, and I’m from Dorset.

Why is Julian written as an anxious insecure teenager? Why does Anne change from her initial dress to shorts? She should contrast with George.

I’m very sorry, this is just about the weakest book and set of songs we have seen in any musical at Chichester in ten years. The fault is the basic concept, abetted by poor songs. The cast effort and enthusiasm, the lighting, the backing music and musicians, the full-on energy, means I cannot give it a mere single star, though even that would be fair for the intrinsic bawling songs and tick box plot.

I admit I have a strong and different vision of the basic stories, but I’d be happy to cast the same four young actors and Uncle Quentin in my vision. In the end, we felt this is a wasted opportunity, and indeed a blight on Blyton. Enid knew what kept kids (and adults) enthralled.

**

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID

The co-production started at Theatre Clwyd, and some reviews were done there. Even though I had tickets months ago, I’ve had frequent emails from Chichester, proclaiming the 5 star review. It was not a universal reaction and the ‘three star’ review is the default. Quentin Letts is the one who got it right.

five star
Rachel Haliburton, The Times ***** (Clywd)

four star
John McRoberts, TheReviews Hub ****(Clywd)

three star
Domenic Cavendish, The Telegraph *** (Clywd)

It has ample charm but even on its own terms, it looks a few sandwiches short of the full high tea. It’s as though the creative team are so busy trying to give us a generic zestful mood that they let slip the books’ page-turning essence. For this stylish show to plot a course for the West End, more suspenseful dramatic substance is required.

Domenic Cavendish, The Telegraph, 2 October 2022

Gareth Llyr Evans, The Guardian *** (Clywd)
Patrick Marmion, Daily Mail *** (Chichester)
Gareth Carr, What’s on Stage *** (Chichester)
Chris Bartlett, The Stage *** (Clywd)

two star
Quentin Letts, The Sunday Times **

LINKS ON THIS BLOG

TAMARA HARVEY

Home I’m Darling by Laura Wade, National Theatre 2018

DAVID RICARDO-PEARCE
Kiss Me Kate, The Watermill, 2019