Musicals & Opera: Vision

Date: August 31st, 2009 Author: Andrew Doyle
Category(s): Musicals & Opera: Vision
Comments: 0

Musicals and Opera
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Vision
Sweet ECA

Jesus once said: “Suffer the little children to come unto me”.  But he didn’t have to sit through Vision by St Ives Youth Theatre.  If he had, he might have reached a different conclusion.

For a company that claims to have no religious affiliation, this musical retelling of the story of Saint Bernadette of Lourdes seems an odd choice.  The songwriting is patchy, the dialogue embarrassingly weak.  It’s the kind of show that would be passable for a provincial amateur production in a church hall, but its inclusion in an arts festival seems utterly incongruous.  And at £10 a ticket, there really can be no excuse.

You might think it cruel to criticise a group of teenagers for their efforts.  Maybe so.  But if you found a cute little kitten dying at the side of the road, the responsible thing to do would be to swiftly apply the heel of your boot to its furry face.

The main problem with Vision is that the premise is overly didactic.  Two fourteen-year-old backpacking lads happen upon a youth hostel in Lourdes, having been out the previous night “getting mashed”.  (This is the first of many grating playground colloquialisms in the piece, presumably to remind us that Christianity doesn’t have to be stuffy and old-fashioned.)  The residents of the hostel discover that these boys are “Lourdes virgins”, and proceed to act out the story of Bernadette in musical form.  By the end of this excruciating display, one of the boys has decided to stay with the hostellers so he can sing and dance some more in celebration of this long-dead hallucinating adolescent.  He assures his friend that he still enjoys getting drunk and hanging out with girls, but that there’s also a place for religion in his life.  You see?  Christianity can be cool.

The kids aren’t to blame, really.  If you’re going to bring a group of young people up to Edinburgh to perform for a month, you need to prepare them properly for the run.  I saw this show on day six of the festival, and already some of the principals were showing signs of losing their voices.  They desperately needed some vocal coaching, preferably months in advance, to ensure that their voices were properly supported.

And it’s not as though the adults in the orchestra are any better.  If musical instruments are going to be out of tune, they should at least be out of tune in the same way.  But when one violin is a semitone flat, and the other is a semitone sharp, those ballads begin to sound like Freddy Krueger caressing a blackboard.

I realise that watching a group of singing, dancing, smiling kids should be a joyous, inspiring experience.  But all I could think was: where’s Ian Huntley when you need him?

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