photo: Tristram Kenton
This is the Peter Nichols musical play that takes us into the theatre of war. Or you might say into the war of theatre since camp is vehemently struck in a services entertainments unit in 1948 Malaya with its over-acting captains and exposed privates. And the good news is that Michael Grandage's revival is attuned to the Donmar space since it strikes exactly the right balance between the text and the songs.
In fact, Nichols finds a form that ideally suits his subject. He is partly dealing with the induction of the virginal Private Steven Flowers into a world of gay banter and drag routines chiefly embodied by the flamboyant Terri Dennis. But the revue format not only allows Nichols to show the hilariously tatty Song and Dance Unit South East Asia at work. It also enables him to raise more serious questions about the ultimate absurdity of sending showbiz forces into the Malayan jungle and about the waste of young lives in the futile attempt to defeat a small group of communist guerrillas.
In short, the show is an exhilarating mix of pastiche and politics; and, at its very best, the two are inseparable. One of the best numbers, with lyrics by Nichols and music by Denis King, is a devastatingly accurate Noel Coward parody which asks "Could you please inform us who it was that won the war?" and which precisely captures the post-1945 peevishness of the rightwing brigade: Roger Allam as the joyously epicene Terri Dennis even deploys the old Coward trick of waving his arms above his head like a berserk tic-tac man.
The virtue of Grandage's revival is that it reminds you there is much more to Nichols's show than backstage campery. Allam is very funny indeed as the eye-shadowed Terri who at one point cries: "Oh that Bernadette Shaw! What a chatterbox." But, in many ways, the play's pivotal figure is the pietistic Major who believes that the communists can be defeated through Christian platitudes and who insanely sends a concert-party into the guerrilla-infested jungle; and he is played by Malcolm Sinclair with a perfect blend of patrician arrogance and doltish sincerity.
Some of Nichols's plotting is a bit shaky: the point at which James McAvoy's innocent private abandons Indira Varma's gorgeous Eurasian dancer is never very clearly defined. But this in no way spoils a show that deals with its autobiographical hero's education, is packed with excellent parodic songs and ultimately asks what on earth the British hoped to achieve, other than the protection of the rubber-industry, in post-war Malaya. Michael Billington At the Donmar Warehouse, London WC2 (020-7369 1732) until March 2.
