Betty Blue Eyes – review
Novello, London
Reece Shearsmith (Gilbert Chilvers) and Jack Edwards (Henry Allardyce) with the animatronic pig in Betty Blue Eyes at the Novello, London. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Musicals these days are constantly being based on movies. But this witty and delightful adaptation of the 1984 film A Private Function strikes me as better than the original. It would be unfair to say that a silk purse has been made out of a sow's ear but the show's creators preserve the satire on small-town snobbery, greed and racism from the Alan Bennett-Malcolm Mowbray movie script while sharpening the storyline and using music genuinely to enhance character.
Much of the credit belongs to the show's American book writers, Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman. They stick with the basic idea of a chiropodist and his wife purloining a pig being illegally reared for a royal wedding banquet in 1947. But they remind us how the vaunted egalitarianism of Attlee's Britain was undermined by ferocious status-seeking. They also make the foot-doctor, Gilbert, less of a sexless chump, turn his socially ambitious wife, Joyce, into a West Riding Lady Macbeth, and even heighten the fears of her insatiably greedy mother: one tiny moment in the film, in which the mother thinks Gilbert and Joyce are planning to kill her rather than the pig, here becomes a superbly sustained piece of comedy. Having previously written a show about an ugly duckling, George Stiles (music) and Anthony Drewe (lyrics) also have no problem with one about a pig: after Honk!, you might say, comes Oink.
But the success of this show relies on the fact that the songs grow out of, and are always proportionate to, the situation. The opening chorus of Fair Shares For All instantly establishes the fragile optimism of austerity Britain. A seductive number, Magic Fingers, is a tribute to Gilbert's secret erotic power and a sly comment on the sexual frustration of many women in the 1940s. Best of all is the way the hidden aspirations of the Gestapo-like meat inspector are released in a song in which he reveals himself as a frustrated Picasso. My only quibble would be with the idea that inside Gilbert's vengeful wife there is a showbiz chanteuse longing to escape. But this is a rare show in several ways. It is a genuine "musical comedy" rather than a through-composed pseudo-opera.
Richard Eyre's meticulous direction also confronts us with a group of people who are plausibly real rather than simply vehicles for wheeling on the next production number. Reece Shearsmith is immensely touching as the chiropodist, not least because he takes his craft seriously and finally rebels against endless humiliation by the town's bigwigs: as he sings, "these are rash times so we need to think rasher". And, even if Sarah Lancashire (left) can't entirely escape Maggie Smith inflections as the social-climbing Joyce, she makes the character darker and more ruthless than in the movie: in her determination to triumph over the town's established grandees, there is even a strong hint of an incipient Mrs Thatcher. Adrian Scarborough, striding through the action in a gauleiter's fascist mac, is also wickedly funny as the obsessed meat-inspector and Jack Edwards (above) captures the dewy-eyed soppiness of the accountant who falls in love with the porcine heroine.
That's not altogether surprising when the animatronic pig is such a determined eye-flutterer (voiced in the finale by Kylie Minogue).
But that is the only mechanical element in a show that, by focusing single-mindedly on story and character, successfully brings home the bacon.
Until 22 October. Box office: 0870 950 0935
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