A Little Night Music

It wasn’t exactly night music. Compulsory June sunshine and the mini-paradise of Emmanuel Fellows’ Garden made sure of that. There’s little to be made of this musical Swedish romance but great songs and pleasant froth, and director James Hallett was right to leave it at that.

Staggeringly inept ticket-handlers and a worringly thesis-like plot synopsis in the programme set the stage for a real-life farce alongside the staged one; thank what can only be May Week charm, then, for the winning performances of Andrew-Mark Hanraham and Jonathan Padley, who did infidelity with all the shameless bravado of John Terry hitting Cindies.

A mime of the lined-up lovers manipulated through clasped and broken hands made for a banal beginning, and too many early lines were gone with the summer wind. It was slow, and stilted; Madame Armfeldt seemed vulnerable to dying in her wheelchair, and her granddaughter vulnerable to dying in tedium. It’s expected for hungover students to succumb to the laze of a sunny afternoon and music set to a waltz time; not so when our actors are equally soporific. But Fredrik Egerman (Padley) resurrected the thing with a nice injection of lawyerly sleaze in Now, and the best line of the script: ‘I could ravish her – or I could nap’.

From then on, it was increasingly all a garden play should be: fun as hell. The liaisons of the Egerman clan and brash actress Desiree possessed the frantic pace deceit requires; actors darted amongst the great tree-cum-dressing-room and Count Carl-Magnus Malcolm and Petra (Lottie Greenhow) amped up the bawdy humour. The absence of law students in the audience, however, left the jibe at testamentary lawyers to fall a little flat; maybe they were too busy with their garden party.

It’s hard to blame them. Fabulous as the better songs, Weekend in the Country in particular, and the setting may have been, the initial malaise was difficult to forgive.

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