HAM. To 31 May.
Bolton
HAM
by Mark Chatterton
Octagon Theatre To 31 May 2003
Mon-Sat 7.30pm no performance 26 May Mat 21,31 May 2pm
Runs 2hr 20min One interval
TICKETS: 01204 520661
Review: Timothy Ramsden 12 May
Butcher's shop musical fails to cut the mustard.I wish I could like Ham more. I wish I could like it at all. That I could find some of the qualities director Mark Babych discovers, according to his programme note. Then it would be a bit of stirring melodrama, expressive of our society and accommodating earthily popular humour plus, through its songs, the common person’s dreams and aspirations. If only.
But this clumsy, crude, over-obvious play with some brief, forgettable songs is dispiriting – despite a sprinkling of audience laughs. Unless the Octagon has completely different audiences for its various productions, it’s unaccountable that spectators who have seen -since Christmas here – Moliere, Coward and Mamet, should find this piece with its ridiculous and dramatically primitive contrivances the least way acceptable. Variety’s one thing; quality control another.
Butcher Bob’s the stout party set up for collapse. A bully as a boss, cruel as a husband, stubbornly incompetent as a businessman, there’s only one escape-hatch for him from being all-out nasty: sentimentality. So we have flashbacks to when Bob was an eager young stripling. Though it must be said Claude Close is all ways better suited to the role of stout party than of stripling.
Strong work too from Matt Healy as long-term butcher’s assistant Jay, keen to impress with exaggerations of sexual prowess, something in reality limited to a single fumble with Bob’s wife. Darren Southworth, diminutive between the others, makes many comic points as the ever-willing, often gullible apprentice. But the character’s a sketch-scripter’s joke, no more.
There’s a desperate sense of actors overcoming material. The script neither develops humanity, preferring cliches – nor rises to wit, let alone use of humour to provoke or surprise.
Vincent Penfold is put through a series of tedious brief characters that are desperately unfunny or mere momentary plot contrivances – if this string of contrived cliches can be called a plot.
Julie Westwood sings her one song beautifully; otherwise she plays Mrs Bob with a flat uninterest the part deserves. Babych’s energetic direction can’t disguise the clumsy farcical misunderstanding at the play’s conclusion.
The music is vapidly tolerable. The lyrics are dull and flat, depending on adjacent rhymes and doing nothing to develop character. Overall, a very lean cut.
Bob: Claude Close
Jay: Matt Healy
Doreen/James Nash/The Croooner/Terry: Vincent Penfold
Paul: Darren Southworth
Carol: Julie Westwood
Director: Mark Babych
Designer: Patrick Connellan
Lighting: Thomas Weir
Sound: Andy Smith
Musical Director: Richard Atkinson
Choreographer: Sarah Nixon
2003-05-17 12:42:23