Let Us Fly

At least the creators of this new biographical musical didn't follow the lead of Buddy, Lautrec or Napoleon and call their show Vysotsky, or theatregoers would have been saying, "Who?" As it is, audiences may well be tempted to ask "Why?", and sadly, Let Us Fly - the title that the authors have actually chosen - proves to be more a wish on their part than what their show actually achieves.

The King's Head was serving fortifying vodka in the interval on press night, but it would take more than a few shots to swallow what was being served on stage. Vladimir Vysotsky was, we are told, a much beloved Russian poet, songwriter, actor, and folk hero who died in 1980, aged 42, and this show uses some two-dozen of his own songs, translated into dull, sometimes thudding English by Peter Kellogg and the late Albert C Todd, to decorate the story of his turbulent and passionate life.

But this is sadly no Mamma Mia!, using back catalogue songs to fashion a newly engaging story. Instead, it is a deadly earnest, sometimes deadly, portrait of the artist as an alcoholic man. In a bizarrely conceived production, the conception of which is attributed to Moni and Mina Yakim, I would prefer not to be a moaning minny when I complain that they have given him a literally split personality, with three actors engaged (often at the same time) to play the one man.

These three ages of the man - albeit played with handsome vocal and physical panache by a triumvirate of Miles Guerrini, Joseph McCann and Dave Willetts - fails to provide little more than confusion rather than psychological insight. The always brilliant Anna Francolini is luckier to have the role Marina Vlady to herself, the French actress who was married to him and whose memoir of her marriage and life to him this musical is based on. Francolini brings a piercing intelligence to her portrayal of a woman wrestling with the memory of a difficult man, as Francolini herself wrestles with some pretty turgidly written dramatic scenes.

The songs, whose Russian influences are picked out in scratchy violin inflections, are energetically rendered under the musical direction of Jimmy Jewell that suggest that they may be worthy of closer hearing, but not in the too-close quarters of the King's Head or housed within this clumsy format.

- Mark Shenton