It seems that I have once more been the victim of Facebook advertising. Sooner or later I need to admit that it is *me* that is the problem, not Facebook. No one is forcing me to buy these tickets. All of which makes it sound like I didn’t enjoy Benjamin Button but I did. In a “stab to the heart” way, as VK described it. But I am aware that I probably shouldn’t book for every show that Facebook aggressively markets to me otherwise we’ll be living off nothing but Judes ice cream for the rest of our day.
So yes, all the “limited time”, “best new musical” stuff drew me in but also I saw some clips of the show and enjoyed the band-on-stage energy, which reminded me of “Hadestown”. Although they are very different in location and theme…but some of the “Hadestown” Orpheus numbers have a very Celtic feel and “Button” is much the same. It’s set in a Cornish fishing village and is a whimsical take on an age-old tale. It’s only when researching for this post that I realised that tale has the same author as “Gatsby”. I must tell VK.
But first, pizza.
For once, VK wanted something other than Five Guys for pre-theatre lunch. So we went to Pizza Express St Martin’s Lane for hot honey dough balls, garlic bread and BBQ Chicken pizza with vegan cheese for me. The pizza was better than normal vegan pizzas but not as good as a normal pizza, if that helps. I wonder why I never got into food blogging?
The theatre was only a few minutes’ walk away so we were in plenty of time, especially as we were in the Stalls and didn’t have a million stairs to climb like we usually do. On the steps down, there were some atmospheric fishing nets, with philosophical messages on them:
I’ve read this a few times and am still not sure whether it says “downs or clowns”. Both work, I guess. There were also newspaper front pages on the walls, which contained some spoilers for the plot. I won’t give anything away but I think I’m OK with this one:
In case you don’t know the story, the main character – Benjamin Button – is born as an old man and slowly ages backward throughout his life. I didn’t know how they were going to do this with just one actor (John Dagleish) but a combination of costume and body language took him from 70 to around 20 before the narrative is taken over by the ensemble. I was wondering throughout what the ideal age would be for an actor to cover this age range and it turns out he’s exactly the same age as me, down to the month of birth. Good to know I could play a 70-year-old if needed.
(Incidentally, if I get anyone’s name wrong you can blame the programme layout. While the childhood pictures of the cast are extremely cute, they are not the most helpful for matching characters to faces…!)
The idea of living life backwards is a compelling one and, at the start of the play, is handled more seriously than other adaptations of this story. Benjamin’s mother (Philippa Hogg) is devastated by the birth and sings a haunting refrain about the Kraken – one of the many oceanic themes pulled through the show. It all ends tragically, which is the first heart-wrenching moment of the show but there are many. Offsetting this tragedy though, are the musical numbers before and after her song. Just before the birth, we follow Roger Button (played by Damien James yesterday) as he walks through the village and greets the locals. Characters such as Little Millie Dyer and her gnome Gerald, Mr Gladstone and Mrs. Gladstone’s sister, drunken Miss Maureen Moncrief and many others appear as the ensemble introduce them and their various quirks. So the emotional impact of this unexpected man-child is all the more powerful for having come right after such a comical opener. But then just after “Kraken’s Lullaby” comes “A Little Life” where the now-59 Benjamin decides to escape from his attic room and get a taste for beer.
I explained all this in detail because it really sums up what the show is like – it swings from comedy to tragedy and back again with heartstopping regularity. There is a lot of joy in the show but the core concept is what VK described as “the psychological horror of knowing when you will die”. Still, Benjamin never dwells on this too much and instead sets about courting barmaid Elowen (Clare Foster).
Watching this show does involve a fair amount of mental arithmetic to try and work out how old the characters are meant to be at any one time. VK was particularly concerned with the problem of whether Elowen and Benjamin’s relationship was “age gap” or not. I eventually made her a spreadsheet to illustrate the years where it did and did not pass the “age of creepiness” test. It’s complex.
The lyrics really lean into this playing with numbers tho, with lyrics like “Benjamin Button requested just beer on precisely two hundred and four occasions” and “At precisely seventeen minutes past 8 p.m. on the 17th of December, 1918, Roger Button raised his hand and knocked loudly on the midwife’s door”. So it’s definitely one for all you maths fans out there. When I say “lyrics”, these were actually spoken over music. It’s hard to explain but with 70 years of life to cover, there was a lot of narrative and so a lot of the songs had these spoken interludes as well as traditionally-sung pieces. And when I say “music”, it is incredible. The cast all play instruments as well as characters so are narrating and acting while playing violins, cellos, trumpets, accordions and many, many more. How you can spin and sing while playing violin I don’t know but there are some seriously talented people on this stage.
I won’t name the whole ensemble as I’m bound to miss someone out but it is one of the best ensembles I’ve seen – they slip in and out of roles mid-song with amazing fluidity and sometimes quite unexpectedly. Nuwan Hugh Perera, for example, played Mrs Gladstone’s sister, in the show we saw and VK recognised him from “Ballet Shoes”. But you might have expected him to be Mr Gladstone, who was actually played by Oonagh Cox.
So there’s a lot of scenes that are played for laughs and some really heartwarmingly happy moments too, especially when Elowen and Benjamin finally reach the period of time when they’re both around the same age. They first get together, romantically speaking, on the eve of D-Day and they’re pretty similar ages until the late 1950s. But as the poignant song in the “Sandcastles” scene tells us, ” the tide is coming in”. This song is towards the start of the second half and it foreshadows the darker days to come.
I won’t spoiler the plot of the second act but it is a classic “Third Coconut” where things get really bad for the main characters before reaching some kind of resolution towards the end. VK says that it’s the bit with the teddy bear that really broke her and I can see why. She was in tears from pretty much then on and I wasn’t often far behind. She’s right when she says that the whole story is tragic and the end, while beautiful, was also painfully sad. Sandcastles as a recurring metaphor play a part in this last song and that’s the bit that really made me sob. Don’t go and see this show if you’re feeling fragile…or do if you want to have a good cry and not have anyone around you judging.
Maybe VK and I are just easy criers but wow, it packed a punch. The message of the show, though, was to make the most of the time you have. The opener says that “Time and Tide wait for no man” and if you need the key motifs of the show, they are right there. Time and Tide. Both ebbing and flowing.
Did we enjoy it? Yes, I did anyway. VK said afterwards “it was an amazing but if it had been less amazing, I’d be happier right now”. So whether that means she enjoyed it or whether she’s mad at me for putting her through such emotional turmoil, who knows? But that’s pretty typical teenagers, right? I bought her some green hair and a strawberry frappe (not to be consumed together) and that seemed to take the edge off.
The show is only on for a limited time, so if you do need to feel uplifted, entertained, wowed and also gut punched, it’s worth a visit. For tickets and more info, click here.
No disclaimer needed as I paid for this one. All opinions remain honest and my own.
