Taylorian 2020

112 L ingering smoke hovers above the stage: is it the smoke of gunpowder or the ghostly presence of the past that haunts this most spectacular of musicals? A twitch of the baton and the stage fills with the furious poor of France in 1815. From the mire of poverty and forced labour, however, come the two greatest souls of the show. ‘Who am I?’ the first sings, longing for an answer from above, speaking on behalf of a post-Revolution France. ‘Who are we?’ is the question at the heart of Hugo’s 1862 novel. The answer must come from within: his name is Jean Valjean, embodied by the brilliant Daniel Odejinmi, who produces a lyrical performance of extraordinary maturity, utterly convincing in his transformation from convict, to mayor, to father, to hero, to saint. Harrison Robb plays the bully Javert with gloriously self-conceited sanctimony, his mellifluous baritone dignifying the zealot who ultimately cannot confront what he knows: Jean Valjean is the better man. But it is the spirit of Fantine that whispers through this musical, her famous melody, sungwith such poise by Hannah Peart, and her ‘dream’ enduring long after her death. We hear it in Cosette, who as a child (played tenderly by Eleanor Crow) dreams of the lady in white that sits in her castle on a cloud and tells her she loves her. As a young woman she finds a man who does not abandon her but survives the barricades and loyally returns. The romantic triangle of Harry Brook as the smitten Marius, Daliya Hassan as the angelic Cosette, and Nicola Forth as the unlucky-in-love Eponine transports the production to painful heights of romance and unrequited love. Whenever things get gushy, however, a strain of coarseness arrives in the forms of Monsieur and Madame Thenadier, played with studied camp grotesqueness by Jo Rich and his preening lady, Sophie Maxwell. It takes all sorts to make a world, and while the Thenadiers would, like cockroaches, survive the apocalypse, there are also those of lofty ideals who are marked out as not long for it. Enjolras is one. And who better to play this dashing prince of the barricades than Theo Drama Drama Les Misérables