|
The current of history has moved on, yet this remains a worthwhile location for a night out.
Ballo-hoo, they've called it; where the lie meets the twee. Colonialism masked as Broadway liberalism. US Marine Lieutenant Joseph Cable chooses to surrender Uncle Sam for the love of a native girl. The plot gods strike him dead via the invisible deus ex machina of the Japanese who've been hovering all round awaiting narrative convenience.
And Nurse Nellie Forbush, Arkansas' most photogenic racist, may beat a towel as she declares she's gonna wash that man right out of her hair, but this is no feminist uprising. She's bringing herself round to accepting mom's injunction to stick to her own kind.
Anyone who's not American conforms to a stereotype - broody Euro Emile Le Becque, mystic islander Bloody Mary and her Butterfly-like daughter Liat are all neatly pigeon-holed and picturesque.
How easy to mock from the safe distance of over fifty years. Within eight years Nellie's hometown of Little Rock was the scene of troops enforcing racial desegregation in schools - under a war-hero turned President - while the happy WASP 'In Love with a Wonderful Guy' had become a Puerto-Rican girl in love who managed to feel pretty among New York racial gang wars.
If only we wise guys had been around in 1949 to get R and H to toughen up their act - and to sign cheques to cover the losses they'd have faced. They went pretty far for mid-century crowd-pleasers; there's still a charge when Nellie finally lets feelings push through carefully taught prejudice and sits alongside Emile and his children.
Trevor Nunn and Matthew Bourne conspire to put iron in the old warhorse's belly, though it can be an awkward mix. Hard to believe the original response to the commanding officer's confident statement that life'd be worse if America lost would have been met by the silence from fellow officers that John Shrapnel's terse Captain Brackett receives. And Bourne's opening choreography incorporates the kind of fatigues that recall Kubrick's fearsome Vietnam movie Full Metal Jacket. Nick Holder's loquacious Luther repeatedly reminds of the shabby profiteering that underlies national ambition.
The production relies on the Olivier revolve; much of the setting involves circular elements, jarring with the straight-line, out-front production numbers which long for a proscenium arch. But you're unlikely to find a bigger, better South Pacific, nor one with finer leads. Lauren Kennedy's Nellie looks a million dollars (at 1949 prices too) while Philip Quast's Emile conveys liberation from a lonely lifetime in a precisely judged balance between fear and joy.
