CATS musical review, 12 May 1981

NEW LONDON Michael Billington Cats CATS at the New London is an exhilarating piece of total theatre that demolishes several myths at one go : that the British can't get a musical together, that our dancers are below American standard, and that musicals with a literary source always dilute their origins. As anyone who recalls John Dankworth's Sweeney Agonistes will confirm, T. S. Eliot's verse often cries out for music. But the particular triumph of Cats is that it never simply becomes a series of isolated feline spectaculars. For a start John Napier has designed a wonderful environmental rubbish-dump set made up of huge tyres, rusting cars, dustbin lids and old bicycles from which the cats playfully emerge. Even more crucially, director Trevor Nunn and composer Andrew Lloyd Webber have raided Eliot's Col lected Poems and some unpublished work to give the show a strong framework : a midnight pussy - convention (" The Jellicle cats meet once a year on the night when we make the Jellicle choice ") to choose one cat worthy of redemption. In this case it is the bedraggled glamour-puss, Grizabella, who is rescued from a life of solitary Blooms-bury prowling. What is particularly heart-en'ing is the way the poems are ' deftly integrated. Thus Gus the Theatre Cat (ibeauti-f ully played Iby Stephen Tate) is seen as a wistful, white-haired Victorian relic dreaming of palmier days. He is then transmogrified (or to:ans-moggified) into Growlt'iger, the fiutlass-lbearing Pirate cat who terrorises the. Thames and who is unseated by Mongolian Iiordes. This (becomes the excuse for much air-cleaving Oriental leaping reminiscent of the Peking Opera, and ifor Siamese-cat hissing from behind giant," green tans, uur oreath suitably taken away, Growltiger reverts once more to Gus (laconically telling us " These modern productions are all very well " and still reminiscing over ' Fireforefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell." But, although the show is all of a piece, Gillian Lynne as choreographer and assod- ate director, has conceived some brilliant moments. Wayne Sleep's magical Mr Mistoffeles does some head-spinning turns, leaps and dives; the Macavity. number develops from a .bluesy duet into a big ensemble routine ; and the Jellicle Ball, with its somersaults, spins and catapault-motion, has that quality of terpsichorean joy I last saw in Bob Fosse's Danc'in'. The show is packed with dance hut it never kills the (language or overpowers the strong individual characterisation such as Paul Nicholas's sleek, black, fur-ilined Rum Turn Tugger or Elaine Page's mournful, spangled Grizabella who evokes the Tottenham Court Boad at three, in the morning. Many hands have made Cats work. But 'in the end one comes back to Lloyd Webber's remarkable ability to find tunes that fit each specific feline. And to Trevor Nunnls dazzling staging: he has cats' eyes glowing in the dark, he uses every inch of the auditorium space and he also keeps a balance between an Eliotesque preoccupation with time and memory and sheer outgoing exhilaration. The highest compliment I can pay is .that I don't think the poet himself would have felt that his material had been tarnished or betrayed.

The Guardian

CATS musical review, 12 May 1981

CATS musical review, 12 May 1981

The Guardian