Theatre reviews: Annie | Private Peaceful
It may be a little rough around the edges, but the touring production of Annie currently at the Edinburgh Playhouse is still timely and enjoyable, writes Joyce McMillan
Annie, Playhouse, Edinburgh ★★★★
Private Peaceful, Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★★
The other week, a BBC radio researcher invited me to talk briefly on the air about political musicals; she was thinking of recent political blockbusters such as Hamilton. Yet the more I pondered, the more it seemed to me that there is hardly a single enduring stage musical that does not have a strong political dimension, from The Sound Of Music through to Dolly Parton’s 9 To 5; and that’s certainly true of the much-loved 1970s musical Annie, based on the 1920s comic strip Little Orphan Annie, and emphatically set during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
The show even comes complete with a scene set in the White House, and a cameo role for US President Franklin D Roosevelt; and if it’s hard to believe that little Annie could have inspired FDR’s transformative New Deal by clambering onto the cabinet table, and singing her poignantly upbeat anthem Tomorrow - well, this is the world of the musicals, and stranger things have happened.
All of which inclines me to take a generous view of the slightly rough-edged version of Annie playing at the Playhouse this week, in the familiar UK staging directed by Nikolai Foster and designed by Colin Richmond. The show’s problems include little Annie’s terrible first-act wig, a few singing voices more blarey than tuneful, and a failure to build up the relationship between Annie’s millionaire benefactor Daddy Warbucks and his lovely secretary Grace, in ways that reassure suspicious 21st century audiences about the nature of his relationship with Annie.
Does it matter, though? Not really, given the sheer strength of this show’s narrative structure, and the quality of its playlist, full of great, hummable tunes, from Easy Street to You’re Never Fully Dressed Without A Smile, that effortlessly move the plot forward, and help to fill out the characters.
This staging of Annie features a lively pantomime-style Clare Sweeney as the villainous orphanage superintendent Miss Hannigan, a sweet-voiced if slightly subdued Alex Bourne as Daddy Warbucks (the very name testifies to the show’s political sharpness), and a terrific ensemble who dance up a storm; and if the show is basically a great American fairy-tale about the nation learning to rediscover its economic and ethical mojo, after the bleakest of times, it’s surely all the more timely and enjoyable for that.
Michael Morpurgo’s Private Peaceful, meanwhile, is a story that captures the most cruel of all collisions between the personal and the political; the moment when young men are asked to give up their lives for the political constructs called “king” and “country” - and also cruelly punished for any failure to obey orders, however ill-judged or irrational.
Like the men commemorated in the National Theatre of Scotland’s great First World War memorial trilogy The 306, Morpurgo’s hero, Private “Tommo” Peaceful, is a young soldier in Flanders wrongly convicted of cowardice in the face of the enemy; and in Simon Reade’s acclaimed 2004 solo stage version of the story, we meet him on the long night before his execution by firing squad, as he counts down the minutes, and relives every key moment of his short 17-year life, from his first day at school through to the coming of the war, and the hell of the trenches.
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In many ways, it is a familiar story; but it’s so beautifully told here, in an intense 85 minute performance by Benjamin Cain, that its huge and poignant impact is never in doubt. In a programme note, Michael Morpurgo urges us to share the sadness and the pity, and to resolve to do all we can never to let it happen again; but as trench warfare once again scars the face of Europe, one of the saddest things about the evening is the sense that it may already, in our time, be too late for that.
Annie is at the Playhouse, Edinburgh, until 20 September; His Majesty’s, Aberdeen, 3-8 November; and the King’s Theatre, Glasgow, 2-7 March, 2027. Private Peaceful is at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, until 19 September.
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