REVIEW: Licensed To Ill, Southwark Playhouse ✭✭✭

Simon Maeder, Adam El Hagar, Tope Mikun, Daniel Foxsmith in Licensed To Ill Licensed To Ill

Southwark Playhouse

2 December 2016

3 Stars

Book Tickets

This show may well turn out to be the new 'Jersey Boys'. It has everything you need for a hit popular show about hit popular music: a bunch of likeable, over-energetic lads; a cross-over into the seamier side of show-biz skulduggery and shysterism; innocence and sincerity in music-making pitted against the anonymous blandness of mass adulation. So far, the gig runs to about 80 minutes, here presented by the former ticket retail outfit, Corner Shop, now going into the promotion of 'Events' themselves. And they have done it proud in a swell production by the deviser-performers, Adam El Hagar (MCA) and Simon Maeder (Mike D) and the Company (Daniel Foxsmith as Ad-Rock, and superb Tope Mikun as the DJ and 'Various' other roles, all overseen by 'Consultant Director' Tid. If you are already overwhelmed by the complex questions of attribution in the artistic creation here, welcome to the unreal world of pop.

Adam El Hagar, Daniel Foxsmith, Simon Maeder in Licensed To Ill

As a showcase for the high-octane, barely post-adolescent frenzied running around of the 'lads', this is highly entertaining stuff. They play musical instruments (fairly OK, but their repertoire and stylistic compass seem somewhat restricted); they 'sing' - if that is the appropriate word - rap songs to the mixing of the DJ, onstage at an elevated booth designed for the purpose in the spray-painted (thanks to Rosie Murray) set erected by Jemima Robinson. It is a playground of testosterone. Occasionally, the fellahs mimic parental figures - as in the earlier 'Punk Play' seen here a few short months ago - but generally, they just play the boys in the band.

Dramatically, the show is a clutch of powerful downbeats. Every scene, every movement, is emphatically drawn, definite and assertive, intensely declarative and self-important. What is missing is any sense of the up-beat to these firm strokes: we have no idea where the vulnerability of the characters might lie - this is like a manifesto of strong white teenage boy power. And it rings a little hollow. There is just too much self-confidence on display. The story cries out for more light and shade, for more fragility to be explored, in order to make the characters less like the monotonous incantations that are their rap fodder, and more like actual real people we might take a wider interest in.

Tope Mikun in Licensed To Ill

Otherwise, what the play tells is that one minute they're nothing, then they're stars, then they're being passed over as 'unfashionable' and cede their pride of place to more successful operators. So, this is not so much an 'And then I wrote...' story, as an 'And then I was rated as...' one. Enthusiastic readers of the trade papers and obsessive collectors of band trivia will be engaged by that, but who else, prithee, cares?

Adam Al Hagar, Daniel Foxsmith and Simon Maeder in Licensed To Ill,

No. This is a play which is going somewhere, and it could be going somewhere really, really big, but right now it's a boy who is old enough to smell but not yet old enough to shave. It needs more development before it will become really attractive. At the moment, it is always staring in the mirror and combing its hair in different ways, but it really has so much more to offer than that. Interestingly, in the programme, there is an illuminating article on Trump-era USA by Adam Horovitz (nice Jewish boy, AKA Ad-rock) which suggests that the makers of this 'event' have more to say than they are yet including in the piece.

Until 24 December 2016

Photos: Helen Maybanks

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