I’d have loved to hear the elevator pitch for Dave Malloy’s massively audacious, massively pretentious musical riff on War and Peace. It covers only 70 of Tolstoy’s 1,400-odd pages, so we have to explain all the characters, Moscow society and the Napoleonic war stuff at the start, okay?
The music is a bit opera, a bit pop, a bit techno, but there’s also a lengthy four-finger piano motif and the Jaws theme in there. We’ll get great singers and sometimes build an overwhelming wall of sound but the lyrics will be through-sung recitative, with lots of exposition and dialogue that rarely rhymes and never scans. Oh, and everyone’s dressed as if they’re off to a Berlin underground club in the Nineties.
This is the first show new Donmar boss Timothy Sheader has ever directed here, and I spent half of its brisk 140-minute runtime applauding the brio with which he’s chosen to make his mark, and the other half smacking my forehead about how mad the whole thing is.
Natasha, Pierre blah blah blah got 14 Tony nominations on Broadway in 2017, but I’m not sure London loves showboating from creators or performers (there’s a lot of eyes-aloft, head-back emoting here) as much as New York. It only won for scenic and lighting design by the way.
Malloy does the music, lyrics, book and orchestrations, and concentrates on two plot strands. Young countess Natasha (sparkling Chumisa Dornford-May) is seduced away from her absent soldier fiancé by the roguish Anatole (Jamie Muscato, a mix of Hugh Grant and Rik Mayall).
Outsider Pierre (Declan Bennett, described as “a fiercely independent singer-songwriter” in the programme), who is unhappily married to Anatole’s sister, arrests his own decline into alcoholic depression to befriend her.
That’s pretty much it, plot-wise. So there’s plenty of space for a Cossack drinking song or a duel fought by two men dangling from the lighting rig or a giant pink teddy that represents an absent lover. Compared to Tolstoy’s grand sweep of history, though, this feels like an arch concept album about amoral, drunk brats with too much entitlement and eyeliner. Warped and Pissed, if you like.
But what’s truly maddening is how exciting and how good so much of it is. The score is full of verve and surprise. The song Charming, powerfully rendered by the aforementioned sister (Cat Simmons) is a banger with echoes of Lady Marmalade.
Sonya Alone, by the mighty Maimuna Memon, is hugely moving. Ellen Kane’s hectic choreography is thrilling. Dornford-May and “fiercely independent” Bennett sing beautifully despite playing deeply infuriating characters.
I liked Leslie Travers’s set, a giant illuminated ‘MOSCOW’ sign where the first ‘O’ hovers and descends like the spaceship in Close Encounters. This blazing ring also represents the famous 1812 comet that ties Malloy’s version into a too-neat bow.
It’s echoed in individual bulbs on stalks mounted to the back of each seat in the Donmar stalls, which also represent opera footlights and nightclub lamps. I was warned on arrival not to touch these as they get hot. But if you are a person of moderate height they are perfectly placed to burrow into your crotch or buttocks as you edge past the already-seated.
Maybe there’s a wider lesson here. Don’t try and do every mad idea that occurs to you. Work out what works. Ditch the rest.
Donmar Warehouse, to 8 Feb, donmarwarehouse.com.
