STONED STONES IN WEST WITTERING, 1967
At the top the 1200-strong crowd explodes to hitch a remaining roar of “Satisfaction” with the solid – legal professionals, police, followers, three generatons of the Havers household – leaping and bopping to the acid twang of reborn Rolling Stones. Brenock O’Connor’s uncanny Keith Richards lookalike snarls from one excessive platform, Jasper Talbot channels Mick’s unruly lip-and-hip work from the opposite. Charlotte Jones’ finale feels just like the end-of-term occasion for the Chichester Festival Theatre: no reserving might extra appropriately reimagine Sussex’s best rock ‘n roll hour. And the Chichester magistrates’ court docket’s, too..
That was in winter 1967, when Keith Richards and Mick Jagger have been holed up in Keith’s moated mansion at West Wittering with buddies , together with Marianne Faithfull rising from her tub carrying solely a fur rug. The police have been tipped off, most likely by the News of the World , to raid it. There definitely had been acid current – right here an American supplier has turned up along with his “psychedelicatessen” field of methods, and Richards consequently turned satisfied that the helmeted policemen have been dwarf elves come to “navigate the cosmos” with him, and invited them in to heat themselves by the hearth. A barely soberer Mick says sorrowfully “Keith, I don’t think they’re fairies”, and we’re off, with a freespirited reimagining of the well-known case when the ‘sixties breakout versus shocked institution morality.
It made the title of Michael Havers QC, later Attorney-General, who was persuaded to defend the pair on costs of possessing a tiny quantity of benzedrine and permitting smoking of hashish. His son in fact is Nigel Havers, and Jones’ play has nice enjoyable with the household dynamic: Louis Landau (a effective skilled debut). plaintively taking part in the schoolboy longing to keep away from being a company lawyer and go to drama college, his father disapproving, Olivia Poulet because the mom likeably holding the ring and supporting him.
That battle is I believe upscaled in ferocity – it’s the origin-story of so many actors rising from institution households within the 60s – and supplies enjoyable in a warmhearted sitcom approach: Anthony Calf is magnificent because the patriarch, a traditionalist susceptible to explaining his horsehair wigs however who should , we all know from the beginning, be taught new methods. He is fantastic flinching away at first from the rock stars’ supervisor – Ben Caplan’s Allen Klein – and from the lads themselves, simply as he flinches from his son Nigel’s horrible new flowered shirts and awkward drainpipe pants. The lad is defended, in fact, by Clive Francis because the grandfather, the once-eminent hanging decide Sir Cecil Havers. Francis, as all the time given half an opportunity, is slam-dunk hilarious and virtually will get cheered at each line.
But the core story itself is simply too good to not inform: the raid, the plea listening to the place Richards is requested why the lads weren’t shocked by a younger girl’s rug-clad nudity and politely replied “because we’re not old men..” Emer McDaid, fragile swish blonde, is a superb Marianne, and her strand of the story – a girl supposedly protected by being referred to as Miss X in court docket however not allowed to talk, and left to be broadly sniggered about due to the made-up Mars Bar story (it rang by my late teenagers, I bear in mind it nicely). She sings like a fowl, too: three of Marianne’s mild breathy numbers, most notably When Tears Go By in a smoky dream for the exhausted, combative Havers asleep in his chair.
There are occasions within the first half of Justin Audibert’s manufacturing once I might have achieved with fewer surreal explosions of Stones rock, good as it’s underneath Alan Berry’s musical course. There is a bit an excessive amount of whimsy as police and legal professionals take part, although I’ve to admire the best way that the 2024 choreographer has allowed stage and disco dancing to be as authentically dreadful because it was again then.
But the second half is nice, with the actual trial, sentence and attraction backed by the late William Rees-Mogg’s well-known Times chief “Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?”. And in fact younger Nigel’s RADA audition, the attraction victory, and a effective imagined scene within the Garrick Club the place Mick and Keef confront Judge Block. And then all of us go nuts to the ultimate triumphant blast of Satisfaction. Especially these of us (all the time a lot within the Chichester viewers) who have been really there first time spherical. And much more happy than Rees-Mogg in regards to the end result.
Cft.org.uk. To 18 october
