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Harry Hepple and Naana Agyei-Ampadu |
Cabaret, fantasy and love: Bar Amazon’s a real jungle
BEEN SO LONG
Young Vic
THE Bar Amazon, a stainless steel and black London joint, with a cabaret podium circled with bulbs, is closing down next week.
No wonder: with its shelves of shining bottles and careful lighting it looks all retro-glamour, but where are the customers? Barman Barney (soul singer Omar Lyefook) never has more than four and often none. The first we meet is Gill (Harry Hepple), who for three years has been toughening himself up and plotting revenge on the guy who stole his girl. That’s Raymond – just out of gaol and who reckons “my body is a map of any conceivable female desire”. Arinze Kene as Raymond certainly looks the part. Yvonne (Naana Agyei-Ampadu) is certainly interested. Raymond falls for Simone (Cat Simmons), and Barney is in love with her.
You may have met them all before: Che Walker’s play premiered at the Royal Court in 1998. Now it’s a musical with a score by Arthur Darvill that ranges from soul and rap to funk and blues and lyrics by them both. A tale of love, romantic and opportunist, consummated and unrequited, it begins with finger-clicking in the dark by the large, sequinned ladies of the backing group. This is a show where people stand 20 feet apart to hold a conversation and pull microphones out of pockets or a slot in the furniture and perform to it. At times it seems more like a concert than a musical play but that doesn’t mean these aren’t forceful characterisations. Gil plays the strong man but he’s soft inside, Barney the sort of guy you want as a friend and Raymond is pretty much what he claims. And the girls strut their stuff and belt out their numbers like divas. Long-legged Yvonne’s “I want a fella” leads into a spoken pornographic fantasy: this is not a show for those timid about strong language and sexual detail. Much of which is very funny, though most of the time Che Walker’s direction tries to avoid admitting the comedy. I wished they would all throw away their microphones and allow the songs to be part of the action, for they are expressing strong emotions that belong to the characters, not isolated cabaret numbers. However, that didn’t stop a large part of the first night audience going wild about them. There are good songs here, well sung, but the arrangements and the direction get in the way of Walker’s savage dissection of attitudes to sex and romance.
Until July 15
020 7922 2922 |
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