THEATRE | Previews

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BIOGRAPHICAL MUSICAL SUNNY AFTERNOON King’s Theatre, Glasgow, Tue 11–Sat 15 Oct MUSICAL BILLY ELLIOT Edinburgh Playhouse, Tue 20 Sep–Sat 22 Oct

This Kinks-inspired production has more going for it than your average retro cash-in. For one thing, the Kinks while undeniably part of the bedrock of 1960s British-made pop-rock don’t have the same level of mainstream ubiquity as, say, the Beatles, Abba or Queen. Sure, you’ll recognise a fair whack of the soundtrack particularly ‘You Really Got Me’, ‘Waterloo Sunset’ and the title song but there’ll just as likely be moments where you say, ‘Oh, this is the Kinks as well? I love this one.’

Sunny Afternoon also benefits from travelling down the biographical route rather than rifling through the band’s back catalogue and shoehorning in a plot around the hits, the show tracks the Kinks’ rise to fame in the rapidly changing Great Britain of the 1960s. It’s got a lot more in common with Let It Be or the highly lauded Jersey Boys than it does with Mamma Mia or the dismal We Will Rock You.

It picked up a slew of Olivier awards last year, including Best New Musical and an Outstanding Achievement in Music gong for Kinks frontman Ray Davies. The only negative thing to say about it is that it doesn’t feature that sublime number ‘The Village Green Preservation Society’, but you can’t have everything. (Niki Boyle)

A coming-of-age, triumph-over-adversity tale it may be, but at the core of Billy Elliot beats a political heart. So when writer Lee Hall was asked to turn his heart- warming yet gritty film into a stage musical, it understandably gave him pause for thought.

‘I was initially quite worried,’ says Hall. ‘Because although Billy Elliot has a

fairytale structure, it came from my own experience of growing up in the north- east of England during the Thatcher years and the miners’ strike. It’s about some of the hardships those communities suffered, and I didn’t want that to be sentimentalised in any way.’ Speaking to the show’s co-creators, director Stephen Daldry, choreographer

Peter Darling, and songwriter Elton John, however, Hall realised they weren’t the first people to use musical theatre to make a point and that Billy Elliot could follow in those footsteps. ‘I thought about the very strong tradition of plays with music that aren’t glitzy, a lot of which came out of Scotland with John McGrath and 7:84,’ says Hall, ‘and also Joan Littlewood’s Oh, What a Lovely War, and I realised if we inhabited that space we could tell a story about ordinary working class characters that wasn’t patronising or sentimental, and make something really unique.’ (Kelly Apter)

GREEK TRAGEDY THE SUPPLIANT WOMEN Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, Sat 1–Sat 15 Oct

David Greig begins his tenure as artistic director at the Lyceum with a bold choice, adapting Aeschylus’ The Suppliant Women. ‘It is one of the oldest plays in existence,’ he explains. ‘It was written at the moment when theatre and democracy were beginning, at the point where Athens was becoming an empire, and had to deal with immigration.’ Not only is Greig placing the play in a tradition

reaching back to classical Greece, he uses the tradition to engage with a pressing concern through a mythological plot. ‘Fifty women from Egypt ask the king for asylum,’ he explains, ‘If he takes them in, he invites war: if he doesn’t, he brings pollution for refusing suppliants. He doesn’t know how to respond, so he puts it to a vote.’ This early description of a democracy marks a foundational moment of western civilisation, and theatre was already part of the conversation.

Reuniting Greig with director Ramin Gray and composer John Browne the team behind his Fringe success, The Events the production also reintroduces a lost instrument, the aulos, once used in Greek tragedies.

Recognising that Athenian drama comes from a distant culture, Greig balances familiar themes against the unfamiliarity of the tragic format: he emphasises the ‘highly poetic, highly formal language, and its ritual nature’. But more than this, he concludes ‘it’s an incredible way to look at the issues through the prism of a two and a half thousand-year-old script’. (Gareth K Vile)

82 THE LIST 1 Sep–3 Nov 2016