[title]
Can ‘Hamilton’ hurry up and come over here, pretty please? ‘The Go-Between’ is a perfectly tolerable night of entertainment, but there’s absolutely nothing in it to set the pulse racing: it feels like the perfect exemplar of how little the Brits have done to advance the musical genre since ‘London Road’ five years ago.
David Wood and Richard Taylor’s musical is a smart, compact and downcast chamber piece that is of course adapted from LP Hartley’s classic 1953 novel about Leo Colston, an old man looking back on the events of a remarkable summer that scarred him for life as a boy.
Roger Haines’s production offers moody lighting, period costumes, a sung-through, light-on-the-hooks score and Michael Crawford, hauled out of retirement to play the elderly Leo.
In their way, all these things are problematic. There’s a lack of big, stirring numbers; the period garb and small cast contributes to a general air of safeness; the excessive gloom feels misjudged.
In building a show around 74-year-old star Crawford, ‘The Go-Between’ loses much of the book’s innocence. As almost everything is a flashback to the summer of 1900, the elderly Leo must wander through it like a ghost, shadowing his younger self – ably played on press night by William Thompson – sighing out regret at events still to come. Having the big star continually singing the equivalent of ‘EVEYTHING’S GOING TO TURN TO SHIT LATER’ for two-and-a-half hours kills any sense of joy or childish excitement in Leo’s adventures, which are, after all, pretty innocent at first, as he naively acts as ‘postman’ between Gemma Sutton’s Marian and her clandestine working-class lover Ted (Stuart Ward). This focus on Leo’s grief also means other strands of the book – notably its comment on the class system – feel relatively played down.
If you’re explicitly here to see Crawford you probably won’t mind, and it is great that somebody is writing new musicals with substantial roles for older performers. But beyond that, it’s difficult to see what is the exact purpose of this muted, conservative show.