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Oklahoma!

Published Thursday 25 June 2009 at 15:55 by Mark Shenton

Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, premiered on Broadway in 1943, not only marked the start of their fabled collaboration but is also widely credited with revolutionising the musical form itself, re-writing the template of their construction and execution.

The years since - and countless variously cheery and clunky revivals later - have, however, rendered it now deeply familiar. What was once innovative can even seem old-fashioned now. But the great virtue of John Doyle’s striking, propulsive production is to strip right back to its darker heart with a lean, gleaming simplicity and directness that makes the show surprise us all over again.

While the last major revival, which originated at the National Theatre in 1998 before transferring to the West End and then Broadway in 2002, was staged by Trevor Nunn in a heavy-handed production that ran for more than three hours, Doyle’s swift, fleet of foot staging brings it in at just two and a half. It’s not just the speed that he amplifies, but also the show’s intensity. He brings out the conflict and drama at its heart between the opposing claims for Laurey’s affections by the handsome Curly and the brooding, troubled farmhand Jud with a sense of foreboding and dread that I’ve never experienced before.

The simple plot - who will get to take her to the box social, and who will buy her picnic hamper there? - takes on a newly-charged resonance and power as it becomes a battle of wills between two men who both want to win.

Though some of the Brechtian techniques that have the chorus prowling the stage, watching the action, and other directorial interventions that provide their own visual commentary to it like the apples and flower petals strewn over the stage, are occasionally wearying, Tim Mitchell’s lighting casts dark shadows - sometimes literally - to illuminate this story in compellingly different ways.

Chichester’s big thrust stage is merely draped by two giant white sheets - but this isn’t a production about the sets, it’s about the sex. It’s a staging that oozes sex appeal, but also draws out the darker avenues of suppressed desire and danger. Craig Els positively simmers with unfulfilled longing as Jud, while Natalie Casey’s outrageous, hilarious flirtation as Ado Annie with Michael Matus’ peddler Ali Hakim is less innocent that it is usually played. Doyle exercises a potentially controversial choice in getting Matus to black-up to play the supposedly Persian Hakim, but though it’s an approach not specified in the text, it makes perfect sense here. Michael Rouse, as her Ado’s cuckolded partner Will Parker, provides surprisingly acrobatic support.

In a production that is cast from strength throughout, Michael Xavier and Leila Benn Harris make the central couple as attractive and beautifully voiced as they are required to be, but also allows them darker complexities too.

The score, newly orchestrated by Jonathan Tunick, is given an exemplary reading under the musical direction of Catherine Jayes. This is a Chichester triumph.

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