Writers: Sarah Travis and Richard Stirling
Director: Paul Foster
Compton Mackenzie, of Whisky Galore fame, spent the First World War managing a British spy ring in the Mediterranean, and then went to live on the Isle of Capri, which had a complicated gay culture involving many ex-pats in many romantic entanglements. He wrote his twentieth novel, Extraordinary Women, utilising his espionage training and his powers of observation. It was published in 1928, the same year as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, making it a bumper year for queer fiction.
In 2021, a musical was engendered by Sarah Travis and Richard Stirling, and that version receives its West End premiere at the Jermyn Street Theatre, with a cast of seven, piano and bass accompaniment, and a plotline of such eye-watering complexity that its echoes last for hours after the final bow.
The novel centres on a desperate queer affair between a well-heeled Englishwoman Aorora ‘Rory,’ played by Caroline Sheen, and a feckless, charming, dissolute adventuress Rosalba, played by Amy Ellen Richardson, with the smoulder of a latter-day Marlene Dietrich and the constancy of a nervous lizard. Their relationship is observed, commented on and interfered with by a quartet of timeless archetypes, three sirens and Sappho. They adopt a bewildering variety of characters intending to thwart the machinations of Rosalba, apparently in order to preserve the island’s tourist trade.
If that seems complicated, that isn’t the half of it. The sirens and Sappho adopt a baffling variety of characters, with a baffling set of motives, and every so often regroup to discuss the success or failure of their schemes. The beginning of the second act features a long meta-textual discussion (in song) which overlays a further source of puzzlement. It is probably a good idea to stop worrying about the narrative and enjoy the campery.
This is a superbly presented entertainment. The skills on display, singing, dancing, acting, are absolutely top class. Particularly treasurable are the outrageous Francophone excesses of Sophie Louise Dann in her elected character of Cleo, and the multi-faceted, effortlessly well-drawn clutch of random men, all played by Jack Butterworth in a fine array of costumes.
Possibly, Compton Mackenzie had important things to say in the foundational text, but Sarah Travis and Richard Stirling work very hard to ensure that anything important is well buried. If there is a moral, it is that the problems of six little people (and a selection of random male characters) don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. This is fluff played with admirable commitment and great skill, but it’s still fluff. Complicated fluff.
Runs until 10 August 2025