The Stage

Pippin

Published Thursday 8 December 2011 at 10:59 by Mark Shenton

Some musicals are simply not to everyone’s taste. Mitch Sebastian has boldly, and at times a little terrifyingly, taken a risk and gone for broke by producing a version of Stephen Schwartz’s 1972 musical Pippin - a piece of psychedelic, psychological hokum - that will be even more brutally alienating for some.

Harry Hepple (Pippin) in Pippin at the Menier Chocolate Factory, London (previous picture shows Frances Ruffelle as Fastrada) Photo: Tristram Kenton

Sebastian previously tried a full-blooded assault on the show in a production at the Bridewell in 1998 that was and remains one of the worst revivals I’ve ever seen. But returning to the show now, he has entirely re-conceived it. Now he takes an even more radical approach that relocates it to a cyberworld, propelling its titular character into the middle of a computer game that we spot him playing intensely before we even enter the theatre itself.

The current Punchdrunk-influenced penchant for a pre-show mise en scene here has us walking through his teenage bedroom en route to taking our seats. The show that follows is like an eruption of Pippin’s subconscious, an adolescent fantasy about how his life might play out in nine game ‘levels’. The aesthetic is part 80s video game in Timothy Bird’s dazzling, projections-based design, and part tacky Las Vegas floorshow in Jean-Marc Puissant’s lurid costuming.

I’m not sure any of this makes intellectual sense, but then the show probably never did. It’s a typical quest musical in which a young man searches for his identity and desire to find a purpose to his life. Freshly framed here as an elaborately inventive mind game, it plays with yours, too. And I found myself being newly seduced by Schwartz’s enduringly beautiful score, especially as so punchily performed here.

Harry Hepple’s Pippin is the stand-out as he is pitched energetically into the middle of his own computer game, but there’s terrific support from Matt Rawle, once again inhabiting a wry, mocking narrator role just as he did in the last London production of Evita, as well as Carly Bawden as the woman who may offer Pippin a kind of redemption. There are also two scene-stealing cameos from Frances Ruffelle and Louise Gold as Pippin’s mother and grandmother respectively.