DANIEL Rigby’s Dantes flicks through a copy of The Count Of Monte Cristo – all 1,200 pages of it – and declares Alexandre Dumas’s French romantic novel to be “long, complicated and a bit weird” with a proclivity for debauchery and strange tangents.
He is speaking on behalf of director Alan Lane and writer Joel Horwood, holding up their hands in advance to admit to the near impossibility of staging such a complex tome, as if to say they can’t do exactly what it says on a particularly big tin.
Lane, he of the site-specific shows with West Leeds company Slung Low, first proposed this Playhouse world premiere five years ago. Horwood has written an Edinburgh Fringe First award winner (2006’s Food) and a radio adaptation of Radiohead’s album OK Computer; and his first pantomime, Jack And The Beanstalk, for the Lyric, Hammersmith, arrived last Christmas.
He also writes for Channel 4’s state-of-the-youth nation drama series Skins, the style that most infects the rhythms and laddish speech patterns of his racy dialogue, fused here with Dumas’s more grandiose, florid pronouncements and the ghost of Python too: a kind of Count Of Monty Cristo.
Modern audiences are well attuned to such rumbustious, irreverent stage adaptations that shatter theatre’s unseen fourth wall and make a virtue of an all-singing, all-playing, hyperactive cast of six, and that is one of the problems for the Lane-Horwood axis, let alone the elaborate, weird story and wandering tendencies of Dumas.
Emma Rice’s Kneehigh, in particular, have almost spoiled us with the audacious theatricality and inventive surprises of their Playhouse shows, and there need to be more visually startling moments to Lane’s production, especially when it is stretched across three hours that lose their initial playful impetus.
The opening removal of the crimson stage curtain is a flourish to rival a matador enticing a bull, making way for a first half of up-and-at’em workshop theatre as narrator Dantes serves the false imprisonment that fuels his remorseless, cold-blooded revenge once in the guise of the Count.
His escape from the prison ramparts by way of a tumbling sheet, against which he is then hoisted upwards, fighting to make it to the surface of the sea below, is a breathtaking coup de theatre but nothing else rivals it.
Life in the fast Lane requires cramming in so much – duplicitous lovers, murder, a duel here, a suicide there – that directtor and writer recourse to tabloid shocker headlines, a device that may add clarity to save confusion but feels a cop-out.
The second half is too conventional, a change signified by Barney George’s set design suddenly acquiring a peiod formality, while the drama becomes episodic and one-paced, the humour diluted too.
The Count Of Monte Cristo promises much but ultimately lacks individual personality, storytelling authority and confidence after its bravura start. It could yet become a winner with more work, hopefully sooner, rather than in another five years’ time.
The Count Of Monte Cristo, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until May 15. Box office: 0113 213 7700.
