If Kwame Kwei-Armah was hoping for a hit show to end his often successful tenure as Artistic Director of The Young Vic I fear he is going to be extremely disappointed.
A Face in The Crowd which, to be fair, he keeps moving along with some measure of élan as Director isn’t perhaps a full on car crash, but certainly has all the elements to be at the very least a fender-bender.
The problems are many and various, but there are some positives, chief among them being the cast who try hard to pump electricity through the corpse of this Frankenstein-inspired retread of a fairly obscure 1957 movie of the same name, but never quite succeed.
At first glance the story is an allegory for the rise of populist politicians such as Trump and Farage, but where it departs from reality, certainly as far as Trump goes, is that it assumes the people will turn against their false idols when they realise what feet of clay they have.
Anyway, to the story –
Marcia (Anoushja Lucas) runs a small rural American radio station in need of listeners. One day she has the idea of interviewing real people outside the local jail where she comes across Larry ‘Lonesome’ Rhodes (Ramin Karimloo who, much to my surprise IS able to act and sing at the same time).
Lonesome proves such a hit that he soon has his own radio show, with Marcia as his manager, and things grow from there. He becomes famous for his small-town, home-spun authenticity and gathers a loyal following, moving to Chicago and TV, then New York where he starts to get noticed by people in power who plan to use his brand of folksy believability as the catalyst for getting their ‘man’ into political office.
Lonesome becomes rather too big for his boots however and starts to dictate policy eventually, after being awake for far longer than is good for him (do those yellow Vitajex pills he uses and advertises contain amphetamine?), he decides to declare war on Britain, believing that his followers will follow him anywhere he leads them. Finally Marcia contrives to leave the sound on when he’s saying what he REALLY thinks about his followers, and his fall from grace is swift and brutal.
Where to begin…
Put simply Sarah Ruhl’s book doesn’t function as it should. After setting Marcia up as the protagonist – with the want of being able to get more listeners for her radio station – Marcia then virtually disappears for most of the show, and when she does appear is often completely passive.
Lonesome, on the other hand, is a supercharged Frankenstein’s monster, dictating the action and pushing it forward. The show should probably have been his story but, as written, sadly isn’t.
That’s not to say that Ruhl is completely to blame. Elvis Costello might have an ear for pastiche, and there are some numbers which work well, but he is not by any stretch of the imagination a competent enough theatre composer to do the necessary work here. That might not have been so much of a problem had the other creatives around him not broached the subject of why, for example, the first act just stops with a rather limp song, instead of having any particular dramatic reason for it to. And why did nobody point out to him, as the charming lady sitting next to me did during the curtain calls, that the title song felt as if at any minute it was going to become ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’?
All in all a waste of a talented cast, and a sad end on which Kwame Kewi-Armah will depart.
Book: Sarah Ruhl
Music & Lyrics: Elvis Costello
Starring: Ramin Karimloo, Anoushka Lucas, Stavros Demetraki, Olly Dobson, Emily Florence, and full supporting cast.
Until 2nd November 2024
Running time: 2 hours 35, inc. 20 minute interval