"What's history?" Alexandre Dumas once asked, and responded: "A nail on which I hang my novels." Yet even Dumas's famous economy with the historiographical actualité is nothing compared with the liberties taken with his work by this woeful new musical. Allegedly based on an "original idea" by composer/lyricist John Robinson, it's a dirge for a meagre three actors with nary a musketeer or Sun King in sight.
Behind this particular bit of iron there is nothing so fascinating as a riddle or an enigma. What we have instead, in a completely context-free setting, are the Gypsy, the Prisoner and the Jailer, who play out a passion-free ménage à trois in the masked prisoner's gilded cell. The only sign that anyone in the theatre, onstage or otherwise, still had a pulse was when Sheila Ferguson (the gypsy) was wolf-whistled on her first entrance some minutes into the funereal action.
Strangely, Lords Byron and Tennyson make belated bids for Olivier Awards here, supplying the lyrics to two of the 21 seemingly identical songs. That someone incarcerated in 1669 should be reading books of poetry not written until the 19th century is one of many inconsistencies and contradictions in the risible script. Lines - "Hate like this could only come from love" is a taster - appear to have been assembled with the help of a compendium of banality.
Absolutely all expense has been spared on the skimpy set for Tony Craven's wretchedly overamplified production and the actors seem to have decided to conserve energy by expressing no emotion whatsoever in speech or song, even when a number has the alarming title of Antiphonal Madness.
In a supposedly erotic dance, Ferguson wafts her skirt as if she is measuring up for curtains and talks of love and passion as though checking off a shopping list. Robert Fardell (the prisoner) is reduced to communicating through a knobbly, Darth Vader-type helmet. Mark McKerracher's jailer employs an accent that veers uncertainly between Dutch and Danish.
Anyone who pays £43.50 for a ticket to this embarrassment deserves to be locked up for a very long time.
Booking to 5 November. Information: 0870 890 1103.
Behind The Iron Mask
