Welcome to The Jungle, the fictional everypub in The Choir of Man, a raucous, matey extravaganza that suggests a blend of Cheers and Five Guys Named Moe. Pints are dispensed from an onstage bar while nine burly blokes with seven beards between them croon and stomp through a jukebox’s worth of dad rock hits: You’re the Voice, I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles), Somebody to Love. It can feel at times like being trapped in Jeremy Clarkson’s CD player.
Our T-shirted MC is Ben Norris, whose poetic asides provide connective tissue. When he isn’t singing the praises of the pub (“Its clarion call is ‘gather’”), he is giving his bros the hard-sell. Bartender Mark Loveday is “more beer than man”. Miles Anthony Daley, responsible for a goosebump-inducing cover of Adele’s Hello, is “secretly shy”. Daniel Harnett is “the self-appointed king of banter”. We have to take Norris’s word for all this since no one develops beyond his thumbnail sketches, which have the effect of aggressively sentimentalising the performers (“His home was the sea with Dad or a cuddle with Mum”) while keeping them at arm’s length.
The atmosphere is very New Man but there are intriguing hints of caveman, too. The boast that “there’s no burgers or brioche here – it’s pork scratchings or nothing at all” recalls Al Murray’s Pub Landlord, who would certainly approve of all the testosterone on tap. Women are absent except for female audience members dragged on stage to sit ramrod-straight while being serenaded.
Anyone sceptical of the show’s ingratiating, calculated warmth and synthetic bonhomie is likely to have the sensation of being present at a cult. It would be churlish, though, to deny that The Choir of Man will go down a storm with office outings, or that it contains moments of unmistakable power, such as the rousing, a cappella spin on Sia’s Chandelier.
The one outright misjudgment comes when Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Under the Bridge is performed in front of a mobile urinal. Even the finest close-harmonising can’t alter the fact that we’re watching a row of men peeing in the middle of a pub. Time, gentlemen, please.
The Choir of Man is at the Arts theatre, London, until 13 February.
