8 Monday April 4 2022 | the timesfirst night
N
ow that he has left The
Great British Sewing Bee,
Joe Lycett is free to mount
a tour so large it culminates
in two nights at Wembley
Arena. Yet, as you’d expect from a
comedian once changed his name by
deed poll to Hugo Boss, his humour
expresses itself most keenly in the art
of the prank. He has always given his
shows names based on songs, even if
he only kept the joke going for this
tour — More, More, More! How Do
You Lycett? How Do You Lycett? — at
his agent’s insistence. Riffing on being
mistaken in the street for his fellow
comic James Acaster, he put out a
tour poster with Acaster’s face on it.
He shows us his tweets trolling Boris
Johnson with outsized kindness, and
the spoof Sue Gray report he pulled
off so wickedly well it sparked a
government panic.
Lycett is ingenious and amusing in
his spoofs. Still, as with the shows in
which Mark Thomas used to detail his
campaigns against corporations, it’s
hard to talk about all the clever or
daring things you have done without
self-congratulation sneaking in. Lycett
holds the stage deftly in his yellow and
pink pyjamas but the real action is on
the screen behind him. (Especially
when, from row G of this concert hall
anyway, Lycett is under-miked.)
The meat of the show is about a
prank that has taken years of planning.
He lets us think that this is about an
absurd yet effective scheme to raise
the value of his home. We, too, are
being misdirected though: what
follows (audiences are asked to stay
shtoom about the details) is more
political. Some of its happier side
effects still visibly move Lycett.
More, More, More! earns Lycett a
standing ovation. I admired it while
feeling that it could have just as easily
been a book or a TV show. Lycett’s
next job: hosting a revived That’s Life!
on BBC1! You heard it (“it” being
something I made up) here first.
Dominic Maxwell
Touring to Sept 23, joelycett.comJoe Lycett
Barbican, York
{{{((classical comedy
S
he turns 80 in November, but
Meredith Monk is not letting
early middle age cramp her
style. Wearing a scarlet puffed-
pantaloon suit that would have
made David Bowie look drab, and
flanked by her impeccable vocal
ensemble and six instrumentalists
from the Bang on a Can All-Stars, the
singer/composer/film-maker doyenne
of the New York avant-garde delivered
a 75-minute set that was both
retrospective — most of her material
being nearly 40 years old — yet also a
celebration of her present artistry.
Her voice is, inevitably, more brittle
than it was, but her technique, honed
over six decades, is still intact and her
stamina astonishing. As she and three
co-singers launched into another of
those weird, robotic, hilarious dance
routines, or broke out from minimalist
refrains into a cacophony of birdcalls, I
found myself thinking: “Whatever she
had for tea, I want some.”
Much of her material came from her
1980s sci-fi opera, The Games. A bit
grimly dystopian, from her description
— but the music sounded anything
but apocalyptic. Sometimes
melancholic, yes, as sinuous cello or
clarinet lines slid over syncopated
synth or tuned-percussion
accompaniments, and lightly satirical
as the effortlessly falsetto-ing baritone
Theo Bleckmann did a kind of laid-
back great-dictator act, but always
interesting in a slightly glacial way.
As the show progressed, however,
Monk and her team unbuttoned more
of their personalities. In Waltz in 5s the
singer Katie Geissinger floated a
haunting vocalise while Allison Sniffin
evoked ancient Middle Eastern modes
through the plangent tones of a bowed
psaltery. Tokyo Cha Cha was a
delicious evocation of 1980s Japanese
discos. And Double Fiesta provided an
exuberant finale and brought two
standing ovations before Monk
stepped back on the stage for an
encore — her elegiac, onomatopoeic
showpiece, Insect.
Richard MorrisonMeredith Monk
Royal Festival Hall
{{{{(MARILYN KINGWILLdance
English National
Ballet at Sadler’s
Wells for The
Forsythe EveningFantastic Mr Forsythe
A double bill with English National Ballet thrilled Debra Craine
O
ne of the best things to
happen to ballet in the
past decade has been
William Forsythe. The
American, now 72, has
always been one of the most
important and groundbreaking
classical choreographers, but his
recent output shows him at his most
carefree and dazzlingly inventive. It’s
almost impossible to keep up with
the breathtaking brilliance and
sheer good fun in this double bill
of Forsythe works performed by
English National Ballet.
It’s pop music that fires his
imagination here. Blake Works 1 (made
for the Paris Opera Ballet in 2016 but
new to ENB) is set to songs from
James Blake’s album The Colour in
Anything. Using the sophistication and
formality of the classical lexicon, with
a nod to the great George Balanchine
at the start, Forsythe reshapes the
language for an invigorated 22-strong
ensemble. The ballet positions are
pristine but the phrasing is playful
and explosive, and the energy is
relaxed and breezy. The dancers,
lapping up the opportunity — aloneand together — to show off what they
can do, loved it.
Playlist (Track 1, 2) was made for
ENB in 2018, an extraordinary shot
in the arm for a dozen men and a
critical hit for the company. Now, in a
new work entitled Playlist (EP), the
pleasure is three times greater with the
added presence of women in an
enhanced cast of 36 (the women wear
hot pink, the men bright blue). It’s a
Broadway chorus line writ large.
Forsythe’s superb craftsmanship is
delirious in its execution — the moves
are electrifying and fleet, vivacious,
virtuosic and flirtatious — and as
well orchestrated and elaborate as
a Busby Berkeley musical.
The music includes Surely Shorty by
Peven Everett, Lion Babe’s Impossible
(the Jax Jones remix) and Barry
White, but it’s Natalie Cole’s This
Will Be (An Everlasting Love), and
the exhilarating dance that goes with
it, that finally transports this joyride
to cloud nine. Precious Adams and
James Streeter are standouts in their
duet (to Khalid’s Location), but
everyone shines. It’s a triumph.
To Apr 10, sadlerswells.comThe Forsythe
Evening
Sadler’s Wells
{{{{{S
imple Minds were champing at
the bit — tickets for this tour
first went on sale four years
ago. “I still had hair then,” said
their frontman, Jim Kerr,
below. The vagaries of post-pandemic
rescheduling meant that they were
playing London first up, as opposed to
at the end of the tour. This two-hour
show, Kerr said, would be a “great
warm-up for Bournemouth”.
Once synonymous with stadium-
rock vaingloriousness, Simple Minds
are back. Back in fashion — their
“early synth stuff” has been eulogised
by Damon Albarn — back on the road
and back on thrilling form. Behind
them are the grey days of
the early Noughties, when,
as Kerr said recently, they
would drive “in a minibus
past stadiums we used to sell out
en route to a club that’s not sold out”.
Now they are playing arenas again,
making a sound that can only be
described as epic, but which comes
with more self-deprecation and less
blokeishness. Three of the present
line-up are women: the singer Sarah
Brown, the keyboardist Berenice Scottand the drummer Cherisse Osei, a blur
of exuberant brilliance.
At 62, Kerr still has an impish
quality, his vocals full of subversive
elasticity on I Travel, Waterfront and
Act of Love, a smouldering favourite
from their late-Seventies Glasgow
genesis that they didn’t properly
record until last year. When he
dropped to his knees and leant back
so his head touched the stage, the
message was clear: I’ve still got it.
No such party tricks for Charlie
Burchill, the only other founding
member still in the band, but the
guitarist offered expert chiming
chords on Promised You a Miracle and
slashing riffs on Book of Brilliant
Things. If the “early synth stuff”
sounded best — New Gold Dream,
from 1982, was a prismatic post-punk
beauty — even Belfast Child felt less
worthy than it did in 1989. For Don’t
You (Forget About Me), much of the
singing was done by the crowd. “I
should be paying you,” Kerr said. It
was an emotional peak that was no
less powerful for being predictable.
Ed Potton
Touring to Apr 16, simpleminds.comBlack Love
Kiln, NW6
{((((theatre
S
ome of my happiest theatrical
memories are associated with
the Kiln, or the Tricycle, as I
still think of it, so I find myself
wondering how such a clumsy
piece could have been chosen to
launch the venue’s season. A musical
play written and directed by the
Nigerian-British Chinonyerem
Odimba, Black Love was greeted with
rapturous reviews last year when it
toured on Paines Plough’s Roundabout
stage. Far from being innovative, it
serves up a tired blend of Afro-
mysticism, bland songs and agitprop.
It’s a sign of what’s to come that the
sister and brother at the heart of this
improbable tale are called Aurora and
Orion. Devoted to each other and the
memory of their late mother, they
share a flat in London. While Orion
(Nathan Queeley-Dennis) tries to land
jobs as an actor, Nicholle Cherrie’s
Aurora (or Roo, as her brother callsSimple Minds
SSE Arena Wembley
{{{{(pop
her) introduces herself with a paean to
the wonders of the vagina. As well as
bashing the patriarchy, she declaims
cod-poetic dialogue, addressing the
skies like a Black Power version of that
iconic schoolboy, Fotherington-Tomas.
Into this idyll steps Orion’s new
girlfriend, Lois (Beth Elliott), who
starts trampling over Roo’s cultural
sensitivities. Not only is she guilty of
upsetting the brother-sister dynamic,
she is white too. (Odimba’s views on
the perils of race-mixing seem almost
as strident as those of Bob Ewell in To
Kill a Mockingbird.) As Orion rebels
against the racial stereotyping he sees
in the acting business, the cast break
into generic neo-soul songs composed
by Ben and Max Ringham.
The designer Richard Kent evokes
the interior of the flat with accessories
placed on blocks. A performance in
the round ought to generate energy,
but Odimba’s direction is lackadaisical.
Why do cultural institutions patronise
minority writers by promoting work
that is so clearly substandard? It ticks
boxes, but helps nobody in the end.
Clive Davis
To Apr 23, kilntheatre.com