Miss Nightingale – Hippodrome Casino

Lauren Chinery, Oliver Mawdsley and Matthew Floyd Jones in Miss Nightingale at the Hippodrome, London. Picture: Darren Bell

Miss Nightingale continues at the Hippodrome Casino, London until 6 May 2018.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

Matthew Bugg’s Second World War-set musical first appeared in London seven years ago as a late night chamber piece at the King’s Head. Since then it has been reworked, toured a series of venues around the UK and played at The Vaults.

From a venue whose down-at-heel subterranean charm may have enhanced the Blitz spirit of a low-budget music hall musical, Miss Nightingale now transfers to the rather more upscale cabaret theatre in the Hippodrome Casino. It’s a major run, with the casino coming on board as co-producers. Programmes are formatted as ration books, and on each table there are mocked up newspapers filled with stories that have relevance, however obliquely, to elements of the play and its songs.

Would that so much care had been spent on stage, for despite Bugg’s obvious talent for crafting the sort of risqué music hall number that would cause Marie Lloyd to clutch her pearls, the book of Miss Nightingale perpetually struggles to make anything of dull, repetitive cliché.

The eponymous heroine – a Northern singer called Maggie Brown who adopts a stage name inspired by her daytime work as a nurse – is charmingly played by Lauren Chinery. Backed up by the rest of the cast doubling up as musicians, her standalone songs are bright and breezy, from the phallic ‘Let Me Play On Your Pipe’ and ‘Sausage Song’ to the more feminine – but no less smutty – ‘Pussy Song’.

Presented in an early 20th century music hall style, the songs sit uncomfortably against songs which are inspired by 1930s Berlin cabaret – or, rather, Cabaret, Bugg’s music and lyrics emulating Kander and Ebb with numbers including ‘Mr Follow Spot’.

And if these were the only component of the musical, we might end up with a mish-mash of styles that sit uncomfortably, but not unpleasantly, together. But Miss Nightingale herself is only a supporting character within her own musical. The principal plot line concerns closeted nightclub manager Frank (Oliver Mawdsley) and his relationship with Maggie’s musical director George Nowodny (Matthew Floyd Jones), a Polish Jew who escaped from Berlin after the rise of the Reich.

Intolerance towards gay men in wartime Britain, and the comparison between such attitudes and those of Berlin before and after the rise of the Reich, throws up much to explore in an interesting manner.

Unfortunately Bugg’s script is not up to the task. While Jones make George an intriguing character – one whose continual use of highly English vernacular seems more of a psychological insight than, more likely, a piece of indecisive writing – elsewhere, he and Mawdsley struggle with dialogue that barely rises above cliché and is riddled with repetition.

Those are charges which can also be frequently made against Bugg’s lyrics. Not only do Chinery’s patter songs have a tendency to outstay their welcome by at least one verse, even the narrative numbers which sit within the musical’s main storyline struggle to excite.

Exceptions, such as Mawdsley’s beautifully plaintive rendition of ‘Nightingale’, cannot excise the memory of the show’s supposed climactic number, which one cannot forget is called ‘Someone Else’s Song’ because the title is repeated so often.

One cannot help but wonder whether this musical – which is certainly not without its charms, and which makes a notable and interesting departure for the Hippodrome – might not improve if Bugg were not spreading himself amongst the roles of lyricist, composer, book writer, director, actor and producer.

There is a sense that, while it is clearly one man’s vision that has propelled this show, with some tweaks, for the best part of a decade, collaborating with a wider range of creative voices might get this piece out of some of its frustrating developmental cul-de-sacs.

For at its heart, Miss Nightingale is a show that ought to be better than it is. And given the amount of effort being poured into its supporting materials, one would dearly like to see that effort being matched by the work on stage.

Scott Matthewman