Chris Bond’s play about the life of Lionel Bart, featuring the latter’s music and lyrics, put me in mind of Noel Coward’s remark when Bart’s Blitz! opened in the West End in 1962: that it was twice as long and twice as noisy as the real thing.

After a dodgy prologue involving Bart’s voice from the dead on an outgoing ansaphone message, and a few weak jokes about finding the tone button involving doorbell/kettle effects, we went to black with the air-raid siren and the bombs taking over, and came up in the London Underground where the young Lionel’s family and their community are sheltering.

The energetic and accomplished company gave us the rousing ‘Our Hotel’, and with Allison Harding as Mrs Begleiter on her ukulele and some oo-er visual gags with the trombone, it was 1940s music-hall conjuring up the war-torn 'appy-but-poor east-end community where young Lionel Begleiter (and, I imagine, a lot of this audience) began. The Hornchurch audience seemed happy, and in the scene change there was lots of excited talking and unwrapping of sweets (why do they sell those really noisy cellophane bags in theatres?).

The second scene shows us young Lionel playing I-Spy on his own, and being bullied for being small, and Jewish, and how he uses his wit to survive and even become popular. Writer Chris Bond uses Bart’s own songs to establish the relationships; schoolgirl Nancy who is good and sings along, bad Bill who can’t and won’t, and is a bully (Bill and Nancy, geddit?).

So far so ok, but even this early on, every point is over-egged, everything is said at least twice and then sung about. I am willing to see that Bill and Nancy illustrate how the artist’s childhood informs his future; that being clever or funny gets us through being plain or ‘different’; that wanting to be famous gets us out of feeling lonely and like we don’t fit in, but alright already, we can establish this with wit and music in one-third of the time they take here. And I am afraid that remains true all through the show.

Director Bob Carlton is a fantastic bloke and a very committed and experienced theatre practitioner, and his work at Hornchurch has brought a lot of positive results. I am not sure why he hasn’t been more active with his blue pencil here. It may be that having been so involved with Lionel Bart himself in 1999 in the Queen’s Theatre's great revival of Fings Ain’t Wot They Used To Be, has made him feel less ruthless than he ordinarily might.

Of course, almost all of Bart’s songs are beautiful and beg to be included, but less is more sometimes. Lionel sings ‘Oh to be Dead’ two-and-a-quarter hours into the play, but no, it is not to be and he ends up at Alcoholics Anonymous with Mr Percy Snodgrass (“‘e’d orften ‘ave the odd glass”, remember? For God’s sake…). And the AA group give us yet another rendering of ‘Consider Yourself’. Back in his flat, Lionel sings ‘Given Time’. How much time does Chris Bond need to make his point?

Perhaps the piece has already been cut. The actress playing Barbara Windsor (Karen Fisher-Pollard) has kept her song, but has no real opportunity to establish her relationship with Lionel. If that was cut at the expense of some the other stuff, then that is a great pity.

Writer Chris Bond himself at the end of the show cagily builds in the proviso that half of it is true and half made up, and we don’t know which is which. The truth is it rambles on for too long, yet is irritatingly vague about some important points, and some of it, frankly, is simply naff. The Charlie from childhood transsexual who represents ‘good’ in that s/he is the one who cares for Lionel is desperately contrived, though well-played by Philip Reed.

There are witty performances from a company who themselves cannot be faulted (apart from some clichéd child acting in scene two). Particularly good are James Earl Adair as Fagin (Bart’s evil accountant) and Diana Croft as Joan Littlewood.

Joanna Bacon

Rogues and Vagabonds - 4th September 2006

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