Absolute Beginners
Lyric Hammersmith, London W6
Colin MacInnes saw it coming. When - in 1959 - he published one of the best ever novels about London, a book which was also a sublime hymn to the idea of the teenager, he knew that sooner or later his epoch would take to the stage. The quick-witted photographer who narrates Absolute Beginners - a hyper-fluent mother-despiser who had a lot in common with MacInnes - looks over his fractured, multiplying city, buzzing with youth and new wealth, and proclaims: 'One thing is certain, and that's that they'll make musicals one day about the glamour-studded 1950s.'
Well, Roy Williams's adaptation is not exactly a musical: no one sings, at least not for more than a casual second or two. But music is wired into the show he has written: beautifully so; the saxophone jazz riffs by Soweto Kinch set the cool, blue-ish mood of a play which takes place in the interval just after rock had hit the UK but before the Beatles; post ponytail and pumps, but before mini-skirt and Mary Quant.
It was in more than one sense a time of absolute beginners. The teenager was beginning to struggle out of the chrysalis of childhood and declare herself (well, in those days it was himself) as a separate category. Men and women from the Caribbean were making new lives in Britain, and particularly in Notting Hill, MacInnes's manor. The clipped accents of the Queen were beginning to sound weird. The world that watched What's My Line? while eating sausage and mash was peeping at new horizons. Postwar England was being shaken and squeezed and expanded. It was making itself up all over again.
MacInnes made a knockout new language for talking about this - a swaggering, sauntering mixture of Ben Jonson and jazz which moved to its own beat and had its own slang. It sounded the opposite of staid, but it wasn't exactly easy either: like the careful confection of teenage dress, this lingo wore a lack of naturalism as a badge of honour.
One of the many impressive things about Roy Williams's confident adaptation is that it doesn't water down the language, but slaps it boldly around the stage: within minutes, the nameless hero called 'Photo Boy' - cocky, gifted, independent-minded, all of which Sid Mitchell has down to a T - is joshing in an argot which demands that an audience really concentrate if they're to keep up. His gradations of humankind include 'sucklings' and 'citizens' (the non-swinging over-twenties), 'beardless microbes', 'short-pant sperm' and 'spades': the first novel in MacInnes's London trilogy was City of Spades.
For all its sharp observation, you'd not call Absolute Beginners realistic: it swerves from extremely high-grade journalism into the inward and idiosyncratic. Williams in adapting, and Liam Steel in directing, have seized on the stylised quality of the prose and created something that, right from the off, looks, sounds and moves in a completely distinctive way. Fuelled by a thrilling jazz sequence, which reverberates as if it's being played under the Westway, the play opens with a parade of characters freezing as if they were being papped by our hero. Big Jill, the curvy lesbian, has bum and boobs straining out of her lamé; Ed the Ted flashes white socks and DA and velvet-trimmed jacket; Mr Cool is elegance personified.
Lizzie Clachan's design doesn't try to project a recognisable London landscape: her towering set, with thick dark lines, giddily tall perspectives, bright colours, is an ur-city, a moving Mondrian which constantly flips open and closes up all over the place. A partition, like a serving hatch, slides open to show the light of a cab; behind it, another wall glides apart to make room for a passenger. A flap drops down to show a bedroom in one corner; in another is the neon strip of a jazz club; high above perches an office. A block of flats is wedged, one room on top of the other, in scaffolding. Characters, who dance and strut but seldom merely walk, shin up and down from the levels, abseiling through late Fifties society.
Williams has strengthened and embellished the love interest in the novel, in which our hero pursues his savvy girl Suze (known to him as Crepe Suzette and given a lovely laid-back juiciness by Joanne Matthews); in doing so, he has, of course, cut characters and episodes: I missed the guy who wrote songs called 'Jean! Your Jeans!' and 'Ugly Usherette'. Still, he's managed to capture many of MacInnes's different modes.
The picture of a capital on the move is the most obviously clairvoyant aspect of Absolute Beginners. That's on stage all right: with its spliffs and cappuccinos, hoorays and posh totty, celebs and versatile sex artistes, and a venal telly culture on the up and up: a programme called Junction! which brings together couples with a connection (in the book, these include a milkman and a cow) has a ghastly probability. But reportage isn't the only register. The scenes in which Photo Boy reluctantly returns to the flaccid bosom of his family are unexpectedly (they aren't at all sentimental) affecting: Tosin Olomowewe, who provides an outstanding double turn as Big Jill, is the loudmouth mother in a gaping dressing-gown who prefers her lodgers to her dying, defeated husband.
As in the novel, a brutal climax is provided by the Notting Hill riots of 1958. Their violence is familiar territory to Roy Williams, whose plays, more than anyone else's, have brought the experience of black urban youth on to the stage: it would have been easy for him to allow documentary precision and polemic to flood the play, and overbalance it. It doesn't happen. The viciousness of the assaults - verbal as well as physical - is made plain, but their consequences are not spelt out.
At least not in words. As Teds chant, and footage of the National Front appears on TV screens, Soweto Kinch's music sweeps across the stage, but with a difference: it's heated hip-hop, with a rap to the sound of sirens; it's the sound of the future, something Colin MacInnes was always quick to hear. At this point Absolute Beginners becomes absolutely fabulous.
