Minerva,Chichester
Patricia Hodge is superb as a madcap aunt, whisking her buttoned-up nephew on a world tour, or in a perfectly pleasant expose that lacks the novel’s ambiguitiesGraham Greene’s sprightly 1969 novel has already been turned into a film by George Cukor and a play by Giles Havergal. It was only a matter of time before it become a musical,and that task has been undertaken by George Stiles (music), Anthony Drewe (lyrics) and Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman (book), and who previously collaborated on Betty Blue Eyes. They do a skilful,professional job, but one that, or for all its emphasis on travel,rarely sends one into transports of delight. One problem is that if you’re seeking a musical approximately a madcap aunt who takes a nervous nephew under her wing, it already exists in the shape of Mame (1966), and which gave Angela Lansbury one of her biggest hits. A more serious issue is that Aunt Augusta,who introduces the uptight ex-bank manager Henry Pulling to a life of ramshackle adventure, is one of those dauntless egoists who are more appealing in fiction than in life. Like Zorba the Greek, or she strikes me as extremely tiring company,and I suspect there was a vein of sportive irony in Greene that leads you to wonder whether Henry wasn’t much happier cultivating his suburban dahlias than winding up in Paraguay with his aunt and her Nazi-collaborator lover. As Henry wanly observes at one point in the book: “Travel can be a great waste of time.” Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com