Mary Poppins (Hippodrome, Bristol, and touring)

Verdict: Next-generation Poppins

Reproductions of West End hits don’t always fare well on tour. The reviews are in; and creatives, actors and technicians may be tempted to kick back. Shows can start to creak, corners are cut and the ambition is scaled down.

But James Powell’s reboot of Richard Eyre’s 2019 production, launched at London’s Prince Edward Theatre, has somehow got better on the road. In addition to its gleaming, joyful, family-friendly features it’s acquired what I can only describe as… edge!

The cosy, middle-class Edwardian ‘madhouse’ of Cherry Tree Lane in P.L. Travers’s stories, made famous by Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke in the 1964 film, has shifted. The two kids still run amok. Mr Banks, the punctilious Edwardian dad who works in finance, is still a loveable stiff. His wife Winifred still has flustered charm, as the practically perfect Mary Poppins comes to the rescue, after a long line of nannies are sent packing by her feral offspring.

Yet in a show where no surprises seemed possible, Australian actress Stefanie Jones is a revelation as Mary. Nor has she (unlike her character) come out of the blue. She established herself in the role Down Under alongside Jack Chambers as her suspiciously easy-going ‘friend’, Bert the chimney sweep (a role he reprises here). Naturally, Jones covers all the bases. Feet in first position. Gloved hands resting on avian stick. A fruity warble in her voice. High-precision dance steps. And a peerlessly superior atтιтude.

Yet there’s something extra, something intriguingly android about her bearing, like she’s a next-generation AI nanny. She is a very convincing human, but she also creates weird uncertainty. Is she for real… or an uncannily realistic bot? Have no fear, however; these inferences could just be figments of my febrile imagination.

The show is grounded in moment-by-moment excellence and delight. Michael D. Xavier’s Basil Fawlty-ish father. Lucie-Mae Sumner’s amiably northern mother. Wendy Ferguson’s gargoyle-ish former nanny-from-hell, Miss Andrew. Rosemary Ashe’s batty cook and Ruairidh McDonald’s dimwit bottle washer.

James Powell’s reboot of Richard Eyre’s 2019 production, launched at London’s Prince Edward Theatre, has somehow got better on the road 

Jack Chambers as Bert the chimney sweep

In a show where no surprises seemed possible, Australian actress Stefanie Jones is a revelation as Mary 

The kids (alternating in their roles) are terrific too — precocious but not painful — while Patti Boulaye haunts the show as the Bird Woman, singing Feed The Birds.

The show’s illusions still defy the eye, with Mary’s magic carpet bag delivering its improbable cargo of standard lamps, potted plants and a tea set.

The grey park is transformed like a pop-up book into a jungle of flowers above dancing statues. And the kitchen chaos that tees up the song A Spoonful Of Sugar runs like a Swiss watch.

But, again, there’s something in the way the video projections on seemingly painted flats of the dolls’ house set-design shimmer that suggests something supernatural.

As for the Sherman brothers’ music, Chim Chim Cher-ee, Practically Perfect and other Poppins standards knocked for six. And Richard Jones’s re-set of Matthew Bourne and Stephen Mear’s choreography runs like another Swiss timepiece… a cuckoo clock.

Twice the company raise the roof: first with Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious in the sweet shop, and then the chimney sweepers’ tap dance in which Bert, suspended on wires, dances upside down on the proscenium arch.

I saw the original in London with my two girls. We loved it then, but now I think I’m going to need another star.

Mary Poppins is at the Bristol Hippodrome until November 30. For further tour dates visit marypoppins.co.uk.

The kids (alternating in their roles) are terrific too — precocious but not painful — while Patti Boulaye haunts the show as the Bird Woman, singing Feed The Birds

I saw the original in London with my two girls. We loved it then, but now I think I’m going to need another star

 

Going For Gold (Park Theatre, London)

Verdict: Needs dramatic punch

THERE’S nothing more annoying in theatre than the person next to you munching a packet of crisps — unless, of course, that person happens to be the WBC former light-heavyweight boxing champion John Conteh.

Such was my good fortune this week, at a sweet but rambling tribute to Conteh’s late friend and former flatmate Frankie Lucas.

Born in 1953, Lucas arrived in London from the Caribbean island of Saint Vincent aged nine, eager to box.

Training with Yorkshire copper Ken Rimmington in Croydon, he beat British golden boy Alan Minter at the Albert Hall in 1972 — only to see Minter chosen to represent England at the Olympics. Overlooked again in the 1974 Commonwealth Games, Lucas chose to fight for Saint Vincent instead, and won gold, knocking out England’s Carl Speare in the semi-final.

Hoping for bigger pay-days, Lucas switched trainers to the legendary George Francis, who mentored Conteh and, later, Frank Bruno.

But his career dwindled, and Francis became concerned about Frankie’s weed smoking. Lucas started to imagine that the Devil was in his left hand, and not in a good way. (To stop him escaping, he would keep it clenched. Permanently.)

Chatting in the interval, Conteh told me Frankie was driven by anger; and although Lisa Lintott’s play does speak of that rage, it’s mostly a rose-tinted portrait of a sweet and gentle soul.

As Frankie, Lisa’s son Jazz Lintott is biddable and patient. I never felt the fire of a fighter so fearsome he was dubbed the ‘wild man of the ring’.

Cyril Blake is warm and cheerful as Lucas’s first mentor Ken; while Nigel Boyle is a tough, patrician George, reminiscent of Henry Cooper. Daniel Francis-Swaby is a charmer as Frankie’s loving son Michael.

And although directors Philip J. Morris and Xanthus attempt to derail them all with an ᴀssault course of props crammed onto a tiny stage in this 90-seater theatre, we leave grateful to have learned more about this intriguing man, who died in April last year.

I was amused, for instance, to hear Frankie ᴀssociated with the 1970s reggae hit Johnny Reggae (‘he’s a real tasty geezer’). And glad to hear his character dispel rumours that he once snogged Princess Anne. After all, as her father remarked: ‘If it doesn’t fart and eat hay, she’s not interested.’

 

How To Survive Your Mother (King’s Head Theatre, London)

Verdict: Monster mum

This unflinching portrait of his mother by former BBC journalist-turned-playwright Jonathan Maitland is a work of high-end masochism.

It’s one thing to have had a seriously dysfunctional relationship with your mum. It’s quite another to write it up, adapt it for the stage — and appear in it (as Maitland does here), night after night, for a fringe theatre wage.

Ma Maitland is presented as an East European-accented Jewish lioness who wears a leopard-skin dress — i.e., one very mixed-up cat.

While her son was growing up, in the 1960s and 1970s, she… pretended to be ᴅᴇᴀᴅ, failed to pick him up from a boarding school (which she couldn’t afford), attempted to bribe inspectors at her dodgy old people’s home, and turned their Surrey residence into a gay guest house called ‘Homolulu’.

Maitland’s play teems with terrific lines and a very large helping of profanities. ‘The F-word’, he explains, wasn’t a swear word for his mother. It was ‘punctuation’.

Moreover, his tendency to wrap his story in protective humour leads a shrink (also in the play) to suggest he uses comedy as a defence. His response is that if you get rid of your defence, you lose (‘like Newcastle did under Kevin Keegan’).

Emma Davies copes admirably as Maitland’s toxic, devious, manipulative, mendacious, delusional mother, who at one point claims to have ‘cancer of the eyebrows’. But in a psychologically fascinating move, she also plays his wife — and shrink.

Oliver Dawe’s production struggles to create any dramatic unity, and isn’t helped by the fact that Louie Whitemore’s all-white set design lacks much sense of time or place. This is provided instead by a soundtrack featuring Showaddywaddy, Randy Edelman and Herb Alpert.

Perhaps out of modesty, Maitland doesn’t tell us too much about himself — and so the тιтular question of how he did survive his mother remains a mystery.

What we do know is that he’s now an accomplished writer of excellent plays about Princess Diana, Jimmy Savile and the Johnsons (Wilko and Boris).

Here, though, he’s more of a cipher, reduced to rueful glances.

And although he shares his role with a child actor and another thesp (playing him as a thirty-something), finding someone else to play him in middle-age might have given him more creative freedom — and spared him the nightly agonies.