Please leave this bear alone
Do we really need a Paddington musical? Is Conor McPherson's first play in twelve years any good? How does a theatre season come together? All in this week's Shouts and Murmurs.
Hello, and welcome to Shouts and Murmurs, a weekly round-up of theatre news, reviews, interviews and more from The Crush Bar, written by Fergus Morgan.
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Did you hear that distant, desperate roar?
It was Michael Bond’s beloved Paddington Bear having the last drops of charm squeezed from his exhausted ursine body by the merciless IP commercialisation machine. Yep, there is going to be a Paddington musical, opening at the Savoy Theatre in November. That poor bear. I bet he wishes he never got off the boat from Peru.
There are, I would like to emphasise immediately, some excellent creatives involved with the project: playwright Jessica Swale wrote the enjoyable period comedies Blue Stockings and Nell Gwyn; director Luke Sheppard has staged a string of acclaimed musicals, including Starlight Express, Just For One Day, The Little Big Things and & Juliet; composer Tom Fletcher was in McFly and seems like a nice guy; and, of course, the whole thing is being shepherded by super-producer Sonia Friedman. Despite the talent attached, though, I find the prospect as bleak as an empty marmalade jar.
Look, I loved the first two Paddington films just as much as you did. Nicole Kidman running around the Natural History Museum with a tranquiliser gun. Hugh Grant singing Rain On The Roof from Follies in a pink prison jumpsuit. All your mum’s favourite actors - Peter Capaldi! Ben Miller! Jim Broadbent! - doing funny bits. That sequence in the bathroom. That sequence in the hairdressers. That sequence on the train. That moving if dubious allusion between Paddington’s adventures and the plight of asylum seekers that prompted a million opinion pieces. It is all great stuff.
At some point since the release of the second film in 2017, though, Paddington-mania mutated from fairly cute, faintly ironic affection for a classic character into full-blown national derangement fuelled by a relentless flow of skits, spin-offs and stunts. Maybe it was the garish animation series that started in 2019. Maybe it was the unbearably twee sketch with the Queen to celebrate her platinum jubilee in 2022. Maybe it was the utterly charmless third film released last year. Maybe it was when Paddington was weirdly co-opted as a national symbol of mourning after the Queen’s death; or when the Home Office issued Paddington a passport instead of addressing the backlog of actual asylum seekers; or when there was widespread hysteria after two RAF engineers vandalised a statue of Paddington in Newbury. All that and lots more has contributed to Paddington’s unlikely development from a friendly, furry children’s character into some mutable hybrid of moral authority, monarchist icon and commercial cash cow, a million miles from the innocent mammal imagined by Boyd.
And now, of course, theatre gets in on the act. Maybe, a few years ago, before Paddington-mania became completely bonkers, the idea of a musical adaptation would have seemed original and adorable. Now, it seems cynical and obvious, and symptomatic of a commercial theatre industry that prefers to pillage existing cultural phenomena for material instead of investing in emerging artists and original ideas. See also: the recently announced adaptations of 10 Things I Hate About You (isn’t that just The Taming Of The Shrew?) and Music and Lyrics, which no-one even liked as a film.
Paddington famously arrived in London with a sign around his neck reading: “Please look after this bear.” Instead of shoving him onto the Savoy stage to sing and dance in the latest iteration of his egregious evolution, perhaps we should let this exhausted mammal sleep, and slip a new sign over his shoulder: “Please leave this bear alone.”
In other news: Scottish arts journalist Brian Ferguson has jumped ship from The Scotsman to The Herald; Maxine Peake will play Mary Whitehouse in a new play by Caroline Bird at Nottingham Playhouse; Rob Madge’s My Son’s A Queer (But What Can You Do?) will finally reach Broadway; audiences are now above pre-pandemic levels but box-office income is not, according to TRG Arts’ enormous survey; director Miranda Cromwell, playwright Lynn Nottage and academic Sophie Duncan are Indhu Rubasingham’s first new artistic associates at the National Theatre; Mrs Doubtfire will tour the UK and Ireland; hit Irish play Reunion will run at Kiln Theatre; A Role To Die For, Jordan Waller’s comedy about casting James Bond, will transfer to the Marylebone Theatre; SOLT has called for clarity after the Supreme Court ruling.