At Southwark Playhouse, Thom Southerland has done sterling work in toughening up the idea of the musical. His productions of Parade and Titanic were among the best dramas of their years, triumphantly proving that a small space can have a long reach, and tunefulness a bitter tongue.
He is on less startling territory with the 1989 musical Grand Hotel. Set in interwar Berlin, it has flitting around its rooms the ghost of Sally Bowles, and of Garbo saying she wanted to be alone in the 1932 movie of the same name. Some of its sourness now looks predictable.
Pretty much everyone here is on the make or on the wane. A drug-addict doctor; a dying young man, turned away because he is poor and Jewish; an ageing ballerina doing the Dying Swan to empty houses; an alluring typist looking dolefully into her cracked mirror and longing to be in the movies. This sourness need not be fatally sapping. After all, wit can be far more lively than charm – as Michael Grandage proved when he staged the show 11 years ago as a sardonic cabaret, with an Otto Dix-inflected design and a crumpled but capering Daniel Evans.
Southerland takes a more full-frontal approach. Full of verve, his characters are from the beginning fuelled by anger. They steam on, their limbs pumping and jerky, their voices at full rasp and stretch. At times the narrow strip of stage looks too small to prevent them spilling out into the audience seated on either side of the action. There is a calculated element to this: the creation of a pressure chamber.
Rising ugliness is absolutely at the root of the musical: the hotel offers a picture of a self-deluding country about to be strangled by Nazism. Yet for the fury to be truly frightening, the delusion – the romance and the narcissistic melancholy – need to be strong. Victoria Serra’s sweet, creamy-voiced typist can not do it alone. Voices and movement should suggest spaciousness. And the Grand Hotel itself should look less like a hospital corridor with a surprising chandelier.
• Grand Hotel is at Southwark Playhouse, London until 5 September
