Ye olde English tourist trap

Arthur (Daniel Flynn) and Guinevere (Lauren Ward) in Ian Talbot's revival of Camelot at the Open Air Theatre

Can there be a famous musical more boring, tuneless or vacuous than Camelot, by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe?

I endured director Ian Talbot's reverent resuscitation of the wretched thing on Paul Farnsworth's tawdry-looking set in disbelief.

Listening to Loewe's vapid score, however efficiently sung, and Lerner's meandering book, it was hard to believe that this duo also created My Fair Lady and the screen version of Gigi.

The only way to deal with the antique piffle of Camelot, premiered in 1960 but sounding as if its heart was in 1906, would be to send up and satirise the whole contraption.


What else should you do with songs such as The Simple Joys of Maidenhood, the Lusty Month of May and How to Handle a Woman? How can you with a straight voice or straightish face speak lines such as "Do you ever wish you hadn't been born a queen?"

Yet most of Talbot's cast perform Camelot with serious intent, playing up the show's style of old-fashioned winsomeness. Russ Abbot's silly old knight capers gamely around as heavy, comic relief.

Matt Rawle, a swaggering narcissus of a Lancelot, brings welcome shots of ardour to the lukewarm proceedings.

He alone cuts a satirical dash. His requited passion for Guinevere, sealed eventually with a perfunctory kiss, is neutered by Lauren Ward in a well-sung performance of towering winsomeness and oppressive simpering.

Daniel Flynn's rather camp, shaggy-haired Arthur ambles around like a rueful 12-year-old in suede boots and brown trousers. "I am a king, not a man," he claims without conviction. The royal discovery of Guinevere's faithlessness leaves him merely bland.

Such performances highlight Camelot's deficiencies. The romantic, chivalrous and heroic legend of King Arthur was cultivated and celebrated with eloquence by Thomas Malory in the 15th century and Alfred Tennyson in the 19th.

It becomes in Lerner's book, and in excruciatingly inept lyrics, the sentimental effusions of a dim American tourist with a tin ear who views an imaginary English past through mist-tinted spectacles.

Since Camelot triumphed in London and New York in the early Sixties, captivated President Kennedy and was converted into a movie, there may be plenty of people ready to be seduced by the musical's nostalgia for the romance of an ancient, chivalric fairytale England where adultery rears a very modest head.

Closes 4 September. Information: 08700 601811.

Camelot

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