It’s finally here – the year’s most anticipated theatrical opening, costing
£12.5 million and heralded by high hopes on one hand and prophecies of doom
on the other. When I saw Matthew Warchus’s production in Toronto last year,
I was dazzled and delighted by its ingenuity and visual invention. I was
also frustrated by its slower, muddier passages, unimpressed by some key
performances and deeply disappointed by its bungled climax.
Happily, almost everything that was wrong has been put right. Some will prefer
the slick grandiosity of Peter Jackson’s films; others will sneer at the
very idea of singing hobbits. It’s their loss. Warchus and his team have a
created a brave, stirring, epic piece of popular theatre that, without
slavishly adhering to J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels, embraces their spirit. The
show has charm, wit, and jaw-dropping theatrical brio; crucially, it also
has real emotional heft.
Warchus’s and Shaun McKenna’s book has been streamlined, but at more than
three hours the show is still long – yet it doesn’t outstay its welcome. Rob
Howell’s stunning tree-roots design stretches out into the auditorium, and
performers, too, spill from the stage, creating a fantastical environment
that draws you in and grips you from beginning to end. Hobbits chase
fireflies along the aisles; screeching, leather-clad orcs not only leap and
somersault, on springed shoes, across the stage’s multiple revolving levels,
but, startlingly, loom over unwary spectators. Frodo puts on the ring and
vanishes before your eyes. Huge black riders and a hideously hairy giant
spider, conjured through adroit puppetry and brilliantly lit by Paul Pyant,
become creatures of genuine terror.
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Will the rings win over the paying public?
But there’s more here than spectacle. The music, by the Indian composer A.R.
Rahman and the Finnish folk group Värttinä with Christopher Nightingale,
airy and earthy by turns, carries and intensifies the story’s swell of
feeling. Themes of friendship, of the destruction of innocence and a world
divided by race and belief emerge powerfully. The bond between James Loye’s
courageous Frodo and Peter Howe’s loyal Sam is warmly affecting. Malcolm
Storry’s compelling Gandalf blends otherworldly wisdom with patriarchal
concern, and Laura Michelle Kelly as Galadriel, a sweet-voiced golden vision
who descends in a skein of silk, is both ethereally lovely and magisterial.
When Rosalie Craig as Arwen bids farewell to Jérôme Pradon’s sexily
charismatic Aragorn, you glimpse the timeless agony of women down the ages
sending their men off to war.
Most memorable of all is Michael Therriault’s riveting Gollum, muttering,
growling, slithering, crawling and darting, part insect, part reptile.
Listening to Frodo and Sam comforting each other with an old fireside song,
he is torn between longing, hateful resentment and flickering affection;
Therriault’s evocation of a mind and body tormented and divided is
extraordinary.
Peter Darling’s choreography thrills, from a rousing tavern song to welters
of warring orcs to an aerial elfin ballet; and though Warchus keeps the
stage constantly bustling there is not a note sung, not a movement or an
effect that doesn’t serve the story.
The battle scenes still struggle to create a sufficient sense of scale; and
the inevitable telescoping of Tolkien’s dense material can be
disorientating. But snobbery and cynicism be damned: this show is a wonder.
Go with an open mind, an open heart, and wide-open eyes, and prepare for
enchantment.
