Brighton Rock

Synopsis

A gang war is raging through the dark underworld of 1930's Brighton. Pinky, malign and ruthless, has killed a man. Caught up in the violence of the weekend, the only incriminating witness to the murder is Rose, a 16 year old Catholic girl with a memory for faces and eyes only for Pinky. A wedding would buy her silence, but though Pinky doesn't believe in love and marriage. Believing he can escape retribution, he is unprepared for the courageous, life-embracing music hall artiste Ida Arnold, who is determined to see justice done. Brighton Rock is a thrilling study of gangland rivalry and the psychology of a psychotic seventeen year old Catholic boy.

Our Review:

6 October 2004

The Almeida stages an annual season of contemporary opera but, in its 24-year history as a producing theatre, it has not staged a musical - until now. The arrival of Brighton Rock is therefore a welcome foray into a terrain that the Almeida’s main studio rival, the Donmar Warehouse, has long embraced. Disappointingly, however, this is a musical that looks backwards on almost every score – but most especially with its score.

In fact, it turns out that the idea to adapt this 1938 Graham Greene novel as a musical has been kicking around for some 40 years in the head of composer John Barry, who was first given his blessing by the author to do so in the early 1960s. According to a programme note, it’s been Barry’s ambition to write it ever since.

Now that he has, he’s reunited with lyricist Don Black, 30 years on from when they collaborated on Billy, the stage version of another celebrated novel, Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall’s Bi...