Review: Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Her Majesty’s Theatre, Thursday, March 13

Punk trio the Tiger Lillies are back again – you might remember their Shockheaded Peter from the 1998 Festival. This time they bring their typically macabre vision to their take on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, you may remember, who seizes a guest on his sway to a wedding, holds him with his skinny hand and glittering eye and proceeds to tell him the harrowing tale of how he shot an albatross at sea, leading to the death of the crew, appalling privations for himself, but final redemption. Coleridge gets left behind much of the time, and instead of redemption, the finale is a flame-encircled vision of hell – a stage effect that would serve excellently for the damnation of souls in a medieval mystery play. Occasionally Jacques speaks lines from the poem, but there are so many deviations from it – why, for instance, does the mariner have the bird’s head replacing his own, instead of the bird itself around his neck? Why introduce sodomy at such length? Why make the mariner a commedia dell’arte figure? Frontman Martyn Jacques with his strange falsetto (maybe castratos sounded like this?), sings 19 songs which have varying degrees of relevance to the poem, accompanying himself on the accordion and piano, Adrian Stout is on contra bass, musical saw and the eerie Theremin, and Mike Pickering provides percussion. The musical vocabulary, at first exciting enough, loses vitality and variety about halfway through, and from where I was sitting in the front stalls, about 80 percent of the words were lost through a combination of over-amplification and (perhaps), poor articulation. The stars of the show are the visual effects by American photographer and animator Mark Holthusen. The three performers are behind and in front of scrims on which are projected scenes and characters suggesting a Victorian toy theatre. Rolling waves, the sea floor, the ship, floating ice, a leafy seadragon of a mermaid, the ghostly crew, rain, snow and much more provide a feast for the eye. The attractive albatross is mostly a lazily flapping puppet, but sometimes a projection. It’s all highly imaginative, and more than a little reminiscent of Monty Python, while the performers’ makeup, some of the music and the generally dark tone of the concept give a Weimar cabaret feel to the piece. Rating: ***