COMEDY-SATIRE. Cont'd.
Photo: Clare Short: In practice for her specially written tango?
And next month the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and Chorus premiere a new cantata, and July sees the first performance of an Emily Dickinson song cycle at the Cheltenham Festival. Blackford also writes commercially, for film and TV. He first met Beaton 15 years ago when he wrote the score for King, an ill-fated musical about Martin Luther King that ran for barely two months in the West End during 1990. At first King had seemed like a blue-chip undertaking, with Simon Estes in the title role, words by Maya Angelou and Graham Vick to direct. By the time it opened, however, the show had passed through the hands of three other directors, with Angelou's words handed on to Alistair Beaton for what he describes as "doctoring". "Angelou was a problem," says Blackford tactfully. "She believed a libretto could be written by fax, transatlantic, but we actually needed someone there in the rehearsal room prepared to roll up his sleeves and deal with all the changes and tensions in the show. Alistair, thank goodness, had the stomach for that and ended up being responsible for half the text." Another problem was the Martin Luther King estate, which sent a lawyer into the rehearsals. "They wanted hagiography," says Beaton, "which isn't drama but it's what we were forced to provide. When the damn thing opened, Yolanda King, the daughter, came to see it and was apparently happy, but no one else was. We certainly weren't." Apart from being recorded by Decca - and revived for a single performance in America as part of President Clinton's inaugural celebrations - King is a dead piece: something Blackford prefers to "draw a line under and move on". That this move took him into political satire was partly Beaton's initiative, but partly his own.
"When Alistair rang me with the idea of a piece about the War on Terror, I was amazed because I'd been thinking along the same lines and was about to ring him. We both felt strongly about Iraq. And we were both deeply offended by the way Bush and Blair had hi-jacked religion to support what they were doing. That's why God appears in the piece." A musical about the War on Terror could, of course, easily turn out to be a tasteless romp. Politicians may be fair game, but didn't the context of a war where people fight and die give pause for thought? "Sure. But I'd never intentionally do tasteless, and Richard wouldn't even unintentionally do it. Satire can be provocative and responsible at the same time; and the more there is at stake, like life and death, the more effective it gets. Swift's Modest Proposal was set against the background of hundreds of thousands dying in Ireland. I'd like to think that what we're doing is in that tradition." And why the music? "Because I started to plan the piece while the Iraq invasion was still running, and it all seemed so grotesque, so unreal, that the only response could be a show that was wild: a vaudeville that threw together dance and song with documentary materials in the manner of Oh! What a Lovely War. The music gives it a dimension that it wouldn't have with words alone." "And an ironic edge," adds Blackford, who is pleased to have given the cluster-bomb song "one of the prettiest tunes I've ever written. It's about creating subtext for the lyrics." What about the legal subtext? There's a broad assumption that the lampooned politician never sues. But the cluster-bomb song . . ? "Well," says Beaton, "Blair might just complain, but, frankly, we stay so close to the facts I'd be surprised if he wanted to go into a court of law and deny them. The piece insults him and I sincerely hope it upsets him, but that doesn't make it defamatory. All I can say is that if he did sue, I'd be thrilled." reported the ArtTelegraph.
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