Thespians review – world’s first actor gets comic kudos from Mischief’s merrymakers
This musical from the company behind The Play That Goes Wrong unearths the invention of acting in ancient Greece – and finds little has changed
The Mischief theatre company has been making fun of actors’ foibles for years, especially in the deliriously amusing Goes Wrong series. Its first musical asks if all those rampaging egos, heated rivalries, creative differences and hammy activities can be dated back to the world’s very first acting troupe. Did the proto-thespians in ancient Greece contend with one-star reviews and attract superfans? Maybe they even played Zip, Zap, Boing and over-dwelled on their motivations?
Little is known about the real Thespis, father of tragedy in the sixth century BC. Co-writers and lyricists Jonathan Sayer and Ed Zanders introduce him on the drought-plighted island of Ikaria and chart his odyssey to Athens, where he competes in a Eurovision-style prayer competition at the whim of a merciless tyrant and ends up founding the art of acting with his pals. Opa!
Heralding shoestring production values is a Mischief staple (this Greek chorus numbers, er, two) and there are other familiar ingredients here, with groan-guaranteed puns and daffy wordplay often providing rhymes in the lyrics. Sayer and composer-orchestrator Zanders check off every musical theatre staple, from the “I want” song to the act two opener, a big villain tune and an 11 o’clock number.
There is some nondescript, occasionally sentimental filler in between, but the songs grow stronger over the evening and include a Kander and Ebb spoofing Old Man Tango, with a geriatric chorus line prone to back pain. Elsewhere, the sound – from Ben Smith’s band, tucked between set designer Jasmine Swan’s off-kilter columns – is more Sondheim than Rydell High in a show subtitled Greece the Musical (But Not That One).
James Spence gives us a Thespis quickly dazzled by his own success, Luke Latchman admires him from afar as Atlas and Marc Pickering smuggles apples under his skirt as an insecure Adonis (the kind of dimwit Sayer often plays). In this panto-esque adventure directed by Robyn Grant, you root for Thespis’s sister, Poly (Claire-Marie Hall), as much as you boo Rhys Taylor’s Tyrant (enrobed in one of Swan’s costumes, plus outlandish headgear). There’s also an affable soothsayer, Melampus (Mia Jerome), whose predictions of drama’s future are plagued by Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats, like those of Thomas Nostradamus in Something Rotten!
You wish Hermes would work some magic to speed up the ending and it could benefit from zippier physical set pieces to bolster Melody Sinclair-Marsh’s comic choreography. But what distinguishes this particular Mischief-making is an abundance of heart and soul, as acting teaches our motley crew of Ikarians the value of empathy. It’s a sweetly affecting paean to keeping good company – in life as much as in theatre.