Review: Awaking Beauty
December 23, 2008
Date reviewed: 20 December 2008
Venue: Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough
Sir Alan Ayckbourn’s final play as Stephen Joseph Theatre’s artistic director is a musically idiosyncratic piece. According to actor Ben Fox, who plays the “Pigcutter” in Awaking Beauty, the first fibres of inspiration to write a musical in which almost all the music is created by human voices came to Ayckbourn when he watched a Honda advert in which the sounds of a car are replicated by human voices. Hence the music in this playful sequel to Sleeping Beauty, written by Denis King, is for one piano and ten voices.
You would hardly expect that so seasoned a director as Ayckbourn would tackle such a piece without securing ten decent voices. All four characters and all six narrators have well polished oesophagi, and the singing is sufficiently controlled that no harmony line gets stampeded on by its peers. While Anna Francolini, as Princess Aurora’s cruel, witchcraft-wielding godmother, masters her vocal chords especially deftly among the main characters, the narrators’ singing shares a carefully constructed and maintained balance. This is important not only for ensuring that the harmonies are exhibited in their full richness and subtlety, but for the convincing use of their voices to create sound effects. This is done throughout, with the sternest test of their powers of oral contortion, a scene in which a despondent Aurora is comforted by a patchwork of wildlife, being negotiated admirably.
Although the fence between fairy tale fantasy and reality has been hopped so many times that it now incorporates a turnstile, you rarely feel that Ayckbourn’s overlap lacks imagination. He succeeds in evoking modern life jovially, for example through the character of a checkout girl who sits with her feet on the conveyor belt reading Heat and ignoring costumers, but also with deceptively biting satire, for instance through the extensive makeover that Carabosse undergoes in the attempt to make herself more palatable to the prince. The overblown number and cartoon choreography that accompany the latter help ensure that Awaking Beauty teases its own genre enough not to seem outdated.
However, although Awaking Beauty is a characteristically witty work, its humour harks back to an age of cheeky filth and garish, situational gags (as, of course, is appropriate to a musical). One aspect of the fairy tale archetype subjected to particular ridicule from a modern perspective is the tacit idea that love is an instantaneous phenomenon without sexual connotations. Similarly, widespread experience is comically and accurately evoked when Aurora and the prince suffer a largely sleepless night thanks to bawling offspring. Ostensibly, two viewpoints overlap in Awaking Beauty but, in reality, those of the fairy tale and twenty-first century are joined by that of the mid-twentieth century, whose style of humour is often replicated. A source of welcome complexity and jollity, the three way junction’s centrality does, however, suggest that the piece may not age well.
No doubt many actors would come across as awkward playing major roles in such a self-aware musical, but Ayckbourn has cast well. Francolini glistens as the short-tempered Carabosse, Fox is gently tragic as the downtrodden Pigcutter, Duncan Patrick is lovably facetious as the painfully English prince and Alice Fearn is a suitably naïve and melancholy Aurora. The less prominent roles performed by narrators are also convincingly delivered, with Matthew White’s confident sorceress the pick.
Ayckbourn’s future plays will debut at the SJT, but the end of his formal relationship with the theatre clearly merits a fine play in its own right. Awaking Beauty is well-judged for the purpose. As well as being funny and acute, it is a good natured and life-affirming work that perhaps embodies a little of his affection for the SJT and its audiences, and indeed theatre in general. Both King’s score and the tight delivery that it is given enhance the comic effect of Ayckbourn’s words, and it would be difficult to watch it without departing in a better mood than you arrived in.
-Simon Walker
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