Plays with Music
Kate Calder (reviewer and fierce sub-editor of this parish) and I recently saw two “Plays with Music”: 'Wilko – a Life and Death in Rock ‘n Roll' at the Gala Theatre in Durham and 'Tristan & Yseult' at the Lyceum. Both were great and very enjoyable. However this is not a review but a reflection on the nature of “Plays with Music” as a distinctive category separate from Operas, Operettas and Musicals. In 'Wilko', Johnson is confronted by the ghost of his Dr Feelgood band partner, Lee Brilleaux, who berates him for putting on a “ a little juke-box musical.” Wilko responds that it is not a musical but rather a play with music. The programme includes a nice essay by Matt Wolf on the difference between these categories: he ultimately dismisses this as irrelevant, but I disagree.
In both productions most of the actors played instruments, although in 'Tristan & Yseult' where there was an on-stage band playing at the top of the excellent set tower some recorded music, including Wagner, was deployed. There was a lovely method of doing this - the actors put an LP on an record player at the front of the stage. The young cast of 'Tristan & Yseult' were beautifully choreographed and tremendously acrobatic, especially in the fight sequences. It was almost a ballet but one with words well-delivered by a cast who combined the comic and the tragic to great effect, particularly in the playing of Tim Fox as Morholt and Brangian the maid.
Actors playing instruments is not new. It was a central practice of radical theatre in the 70s and 80s. Kate and I saw an excellent touring production of 'Oh What a Lovely War' in Dundee in 2024 by Blackeyed Theatre with a young cast (its only Scottish date). That was also in the radical tradition: Joan Littlewood's 1963 Theatre Workshop original derived its style from Music Hall which along with Folk and the Blues was always central to politically-committed theatre. I contend that it is absent from Opera in all its forms, including - as those who disdain wit and entertainment need to be reminded – Gilbert and Sullivan. “High Art” has always had an exaggerated sense of self importance.
For me, and this is where I disagree with Matt Wolf, “Plays with Music” is a newer form, often with popular and radical roots. I knew the then John Wilkinson well when we were both students at Newcastle University in the 1960s and both active in left-wing politics. He put me on to the Icelandic Sagas, which, interestingly, have not, so far as I am aware, contributed story lines to Opera – far too tough stuff, I guess! John remained true to his political beliefs as illustrated by the wonderful 'Oil City Confidential' TV documentary which showed how his kind of music came out of the lived experience of London’s displaced working class in the “Thames Delta” and its world of pollution and beauty combined. I saw him for brief conversations in Northern Ireland when he was playing there in the 70s, and at the legendary Rockshots in Newcastle in the 1980s. (I recall a librarian from Durham University, where we both worked, fell off a table where she was dancing onto me!) I was eager to see the theatrical version of his life.
In her foreword to the programme for 'Tristan & Yseult' Emma Rice, its original director, whose company has mounted this production, recounts how it began in a Cornish field more than twenty years ago and speaks to central themes of love, loyalty and community. It still does and I claim it for a radical and popular tradition which seems to inform many “Plays with Music” Unlike the appalling mangling of 'The Threepenny Opera' from Brecht's once-socialist Berliner Ensemble, which the EIF inflicted on us in 2024, this is true to its roots and its purpose.
Perhaps the key distinction is not about the engagement of stage performers with music-making but that in “Plays with Music” the text is the core with the music enhancing and complementing it. So, we have not a dichotomy but a continuum. Opera, especially opera not sung in the language of the audience, is towards one extreme with operetta, Gilbert and Sullivan further along the scale and “Plays with Music” placed before plays in which the music, whilst part of the production, is correctly described as “incidental”.
photo credit: Steve Arnott
