The pleasure of ticking theatrical boxes

I didn't realise that the revolutionaries in Les Miserables failed, but they do. As it turns out, the revolution of the play is not that of '79 but one set in 1832, which is put down, in line with French history of that era (I must assume, my sense of French history being terrible).

The question is, why didn't I know this? How had I managed not to know the plot of Les Miserables, despite the fact that it has been on for 123432809543 years? For many people, a knowledge of the plot, characters, and songs of Les Mis arrives at around Key Stage 2. And considering how long it has been on, you'd think everyone would know, including me. 'Are there really no cheap seats left?' I had asked the ticket man. 'No,' he said, despondently: 'you'd think everyone would have seen it by now.'

But the thing that was so charming about the play was the fact that it was so bloody quirky, despite being a mainstay of the West End.

For a start, the plot is weird. The main character, Jean Valjean, is a kind of rescued thief turned bourgeouis, turned revolutionary, who ends the play singing harmonies to the main tune from beyond the grave. Otherwise, the plot is Dickensian, with good Dickensian devices like revelations in courtrooms, drownings, economic satire, a bourgeouis heroine sequestered by a Lear-like father, and deaths, deaths deaths deaths, like they are in Dickens, i.e. with lots of meaning attached to them.

To give one example, there is a character - Javert, my program tells me - who kills himself. He kills himself because, having hunted down a certain criminal for years, he finally finds himself at the mercy of said criminal, who holds a rifle to his head with instructions to kill him, but releases him. Javert finds that he cannot live his life once it has been gifted him by the man he lived to destroy, and so kills himself instead. I would bet £10 that this is the most complicated, dark and philosophical reason for any nightly death in the West End currently.

My gripe has to do with Trevor Nunn, who has waved his wand over this production, and done his best to make it dull, glittering and still. Nunn is like a nun, (the ecclesiastical type) predictable in what he does, but never really exciting. He is the king of stasis. He brings to life tiny moments very well, but cannot seem to choreograph animation for large scenes. His direction is rigid: significant moments must happen at such and such a point. As such the direction and set exist around the actors like a sarcophagus or whited sepulchre: beautiful but absolutely rigid, encasing the actors.

Of course, it is no mistake that he has stuck his oar in with West End shows: his direction promises a maximum of fixity, certain small but guaranteed results over a run. One feels that the investors like him because he is the safe bet. However, as an audience member, you get the same frustration that you get playing someone who beats you at pool by being consistent but not brilliant. You know the type? 3 pints of beer down, you veer from physics-defying brilliance to complete incompetence, but in the end lose because your opponent has sunk one ball per turn.

After such a long career, Nunn seems to be immovable. When, in twenty years time, I finally make it as a West-End director, and put on my stage spectacular where a reconstruction German U-boat is eaten by a dinosaur animated by Chinese puppeteers, it will fold within days, because I have made various directorly mistakes, i.e. cast someone in the lead who I wanted to sleep with but who couldn't sing, drawn up plans for a mechanical set so complicated it kills two cast membersduring rehearsals, and chosen a script so impenetrable that no-one understands it.

As I drink anti-freeze beneath the statue of Eros in Picadilly Circus, and cry to myself, I will see through my tears that a new Trevor Nunn show will be opening. The man himself, fortified by every increased amounts of hair-dye, will have opened another one. As the weeks pass and I drink more anti-freeze, the show will run and run, eventually gaining such a reputation for precision and predictability that the BBC will use certain stage effects in the second half to set their broadcast clocks by.

This direction can work, given a cast who are bouncing off of the walls with enough energy of their own. His production of Cymbeline in Cambridge was great, for example. But for this one...hmmm.

In any case, it was a good night, and a good play. Hanging around with a lot of theatre types, it is easy to pick up snobbery about what is popular, and what has been running a long time, but at the end of the day these plays have been running a long time because they are entertaining. And even if going to see them is an exercise in theatrical box-ticking, who says that ticking boxes cannot be entertaining?

That sounds like the idea for a play. Now I just need a place for the u-boat...