JACQUES BREL: THE RAGE TO LIVE. To 13 January.
London.
JACQUES BREL THE RAGE TO LIVE
by Judith Paris lyrics translated by Anthony Cable.
New End Theatre 27 New End NW3 1JD To 13 January 2008.
Wed-Mon 9.30pm.
Runs 1hr 20min No interval.
TICKETS: 0870 033 2733.
www.newendtheatre.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 27 December.
Strong, lyrical show about a strong, lyrical man.
In 1968 it was possible to call a show Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris and be right on all counts. But the Belgian singer/songwriter (among other skills) died in 1978, not quite 50 and a continuing enigma.
His several hundred songs (this show includes fifteen) range from personal to political, from sombre to humorous. Fast or slow there’s a driven quality, an intensity that reflects the man we see looking back over his life.
The Brel of Judith Paris’s incisive script is fuelled by determination. Determined to sing in Paris he leaves Brussels with his guitar. He suddenly stops songwriting. Seeing Man of La Mancha he identifies with Don Quixote and decides to play the role, so he persuades tough American producers to let him translate and perform the piece in French.
Yet he was driven too by a sense of failure, especially with women, who were so important in his life. Many of these songs explore the inevitable barriers to attaining a fulfilled love.
Brel reached one place he wanted to be. The Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia where he’s buried, as he’d wished: raw, remote and right for this ever-striving, self-demanding artist who, in Paris’s production for Song Merchants, is in the strong, Brel-like hands of Anthony Cable.
He has a tendency to use spoken dialogue to stimulate emotion, rather than going for the thought and letting feeling arise naturally. But he gives a sense of his man; and each time the show moves into song the impact’s terrific. This isn’t a singing actor; this is a singer who can reach to the heart and the extremities of each number, can shape and structure it, build and maintain momentum or stretch out a line flexibly, with silken ease.
He’s helped by Stuart Barr’s fine arrangements, with piano or accordion filling in the implications of each song’s architecture. Barr himself on piano and Franko Bozac on the largest accordion I’ve ever come across, are key components in this tremendous show, which must transfer, if only to give me the excuse to review it again.
Jacques Brel: Anthony Cable
Director: Judith Paris.
Musical Director: Stuart Barr.
2008-01-03 12:25:23