First impressions of Nikolai Foster’s Evita at Leicester’s Curve are impressive. Evita’s coffin rests on a dais raised above the heads of a phalanx of black-clad mourners who intone a requiem. At its foot, a single figure – Evita’s husband, the president of Argentina, Juan Perón (Gary Milner). The entrance of Tyrone Huntley’s narrator figure, Che, rising from a seat in the auditorium, singing Oh What a Circus, makes a strong human contrast to the rigid formality. Here we have, in microcosm, the conflicts at the core of this 1978 musical, based on the life of Eva Perón and created by Tim Rice (lyrics) and Andrew Lloyd Webber (music): between woman and icon, people and leaders, poverty and riches.
The problem with Foster’s production overall, though, is that it goes on to flatten these contrasts. Its visual presentation, while striking, feels too distancing. Starkness is the keynote, in Michael Taylor’s tubular scaffolding set, and Joshie Harriette’s chiaroscuro lighting. Edd Lindley’s costumes keep the chorus covered in black: when they dance, their bodies indistinct against the dark background, the lines of Adam Murray’s energetic choreography become muted.
We are lacking the visual clues to place and circumstance that might express Evita’s rise from poverty to power, or communicate the contrasts between her “people” and the leaders who control their fate. Live music, under Stephen Brooker’s supervision, brings warmth and energy through Latin and rock rhythms, but vocal delivery (in solo and choral singing) is not always clear, with the result that lyrics carrying vital plot information are lost.
Perhaps Foster intends to communicate the impersonality of power structures, but I longed for more moments of emotional connection with the characters, such as those rendered so affectingly by Chumisa Dornford-May, as Perón’s rejected mistress, in Another Suitcase in Another Hall, and by Martha Kirby’s Eva Perón, dying of cancer yet struggling to carry on.
Over in Cardiff, Catherine Dyson’s new version of JM Barrie’s Peter Pan (first staged in 1904) brings the setting closer to the present, with songs composed by Gwyneth Herbert. As Mr and Mrs Darling (Keiron Self and Alex Murdoch) put their three children to bed, we discover that their marriage is unravelling and that they’re heading off to a party in an attempt to rediscover their lost connection. Twelve-year-old Wendy (the always excellent Emily Burnett) worries what will happen to the family if their parents divorce. She carries this anxiety with her to Neverland, where her relationship with Rebecca Hayes’s petulant Peter Pan comes to mirror that of her mother and ever-boyish father. Ultimately, this experience helps Wendy, and her brothers, to adjust to the new reality once their mother and father have separated.
The framing idea is good but hasn’t been fully worked out. Wendy’s transition to “Mother” in Neverland, and her insistence on a wedding to Peter Pan, feels out of keeping with the character as she is presented at the beginning. Too many scenes rely on narration, flatly presented. That said, action sequences work well (Lee Lyford directs): feats of flying delight the schools audience almost as much as the crocodile, crunching the defeated Captain Hook (Murdoch) between its jaws.
Star ratings (out of five)
Evita ★★★
Peter Pan ★★★
