Theatre Review
Postcards from God
The Sister Wendy Musical
Music, Book &Lyrics: Marcus Reeves Producer: Simon James Collier Directed, staged and choreographed by Omar F. Okai
March 4 – 23, 2008
A review by Maddy Ryle for EXTRA! EXTRA!
Marcus Reeves has selected an unusual subject from which to make a musical show in Postcards from God: The Sister Wendy Musical, directed and staged here by Omar F. Okai. Sister Wendy Beckett is a nun who lives a life of solitude and prayer at a monastery in the east of England. In the 1990s, however, she took a bizarre step out of this hermetic lifestyle to present a very successful series of BBC documentaries on art, a subject she had grown to love and known through books and postcards, and which she felt compelled to share with the world thanks to her belief that ‘art is meant for everyone’. For a while this woman, a nun since the age of 16, became a household name and celebrity. After her fling with fame, Sister Wendy retreated back to her caravan and the simple life. Reeves first resurrected her to public attention with a run of Postcards from God at the Jermyn Street theatre in early 2007, to not very favourable reviews. The show has now transferred, with a mostly new cast and a changed script and score, to the very intimate space of Hackney Empire’s Studio Theatre. So small is the room that it takes away the ‘big show’ aspect of a West End musical, making an uncomfortable marriage of format and arena, but also in some way adding to the human aspect of the tale.
There is the potential to explore some interesting themes in this story – the simultaneously seductive and repulsive nature of celebrity; the popular reception of ‘high’ culture; the merits of the private versus the public life; the meaning and purpose of artistic creativity and beauty in human society. The choice to present what are essentially intellectual concerns in the most popular form of theatrical production – the musical – is a clever continuation of these antagonisms for which Reeves must be given credit. When the show was opened in the West End, Reeves was accused of producing an overly saccharine hagiography of Wendy. He seems to have taken those criticisms on board and gives us a sharper and more detached portrayal of Wendy, played brilliantly by Gay Soper, whose permanently perplexed expression hints at the paradoxes of her situation. There are a lot of funny, sardonic moments, and the script and songs often have the tongue firmly in the cheek. Musical in-jokes abound, such as when the Mother Superior sings of life not being all ‘whiskers on kittens and raindrops on roses’. At one point a brash American tourist tells Sister Wendy how her ‘romantic’ programmes have rescued the sex life of her marriage – at once both a comment on Wendy’s lack of fastidiousness about the body and on the complexities of popularising rarefied artistic achievement. There is enjoyment to be had, as well, out of the analysis (in song, obviously) of the paintings, which are represented in tableaux by the cast, who then come to life, sometimes as a Barbie-doll prancing Venus (Botticelli in the style of Gilbert and Sullivan) or an evocative musical ode to loneliness in Hopper’s Nighthawks. The weakest moments are some of the songs themselves, which fail to hit the right note of irony, especially coming from the mouth of the far too earnest Daniel (Chris Polick), the TV producer who has initiated Wendy’s tour of fame (and who, unfortunately, isn’t much of a singer). Some of the ensemble pieces from the mainly female cast also have an unpolished feel to them, but then you can’t help feeling (especially looking at Okai’s minimal set) that this is not meant to feel polished. There is a nice bit of satire in the Gospel tune ‘Touch a Celebrity’, sung by fame-obsessed TV hostess Sugar Hill (a great performance from Nicola Blackman, who is also very entertaining as Daniel’s ditzy PA Pammy). You could also argue that Reeves has not done enough to objectify his subject; this is still a biographical piece, and Sister Wendy is still given an uncritical appraisal. It would have been good to have explored more the lure of fame for this smart woman – the question of why she continued to make TV programmes when she claims she hates the celebrity circus so much is not adequately dealt with by Wendy’s own claim that ‘God asked me to do this’. All in all though, this is an entertaining and at times thought-provoking vignette which had me laughing out loud at several points. I enjoyed it – and that’s coming from someone who hates musicals.
Hackney Empire Studio Theatre 291 Mare Street, London E8 1EJ Tues – Sun 7.30pm Tickets ₤12 / ₤8 Concs / ₤5 for groups of 10+ Box Office: 020 8985 2424
http://www.hackneyempire.co.uk
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