The Lord of the Rings

Published Wednesday 20 June 2007 at 13:15 by Mark Shenton

To borrow what Pickering tells Higgins in My Fair Lady, another former tenant of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, here’s what I’d like to say to director and co-adaptor Matthew Warchus of his revised stage version of The Lord of the Rings: “You did it! You said that you would do it, and indeed you did. I thought that you would rue it. I doubted you’d do it. But now I must admit that succeed you did!”

There was a lot of scepticism about when he originally embarked on bringing a version of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings to the stage, and some of those doubts were amplified when it first opened in Toronto in March last year, and ran for just 230 performances. I saw it there and though I was knocked out by its amazing stagecraft and its epic sweep, there were also concerns about its immense length - it ran for nearly four hours - but also quite what sort of animal it was.

The creators were reluctant to call it a musical, preferring to see it as a piece of total theatre that borrowed some of musical theatre’s conventions. But though there’s nothing conventional about the result, the show has both been streamlined and clarified, and the score - by AR Rahman, Varttina and Christopher Nightingale - eclectically immerses the show in its own aural world.

There may still be a surfeit of exposition, particularly (and inevitably) in the first act, in the attempt to distil more than 1,200 pages of the novel into a single evening’s theatre, and a second interval has been jarringly removed, with the transition to the third merely being marked now by an incongruous invasion of an army of orcs into the audience, that disrupts the serious tone that has by then been established.

But elsewhere, it both looks and behaves as a spectacular piece of music theatre, and there isn’t a single production element that doesn’t impress and frequently thrill. The undulating, intersecting revolves that Rob Howell’s set is built upon create a highly distinctive physical universe and its strange and troubling figures, like the Black Riders, the Orcs and a giant spider that spreads its tentacles over the entire stage, are brought to vivid life. Paul Pyant sumptuously lights it with a sculptural intensity.

While the stage is kept in perpetual motion, so are the cast who, in Peter Darling’s athletic and dynamic choreography, animate it spectacularly. While Tolkien’s story - with echoes of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Wagner’s Ring Cycle in its mythical, mystical battle of good and evil and the attempt to return a ring with demonic powers to the place it was forged in - has a dark, tangled intensity of its own, its characters are brought to the stage by a vast ensemble cast that includes stand-out turns from Michael Therriault as the galvanisingly troubled Caliban-like Gollum and Malcolm Storry’s imperious Prospero figure of Gandalf.