Declan Bennett, Danielle Kassaraté, Leon Scott and Kate Robson-Stuart in Striking 12 at the Union Theatre, London. Picture: Tom Grace
Striking 12 continues at the Union Theatre, London until 23 December 2018.
Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩
On the face of it, Hans Christian Andersen’s short story The Little Match Girl is far from the ideal basis for an uplifting Christmas musical (spoiler: an abused girl tries to keep herself warm by burning the matches she’s supposed to be selling, but dies of hypothermia anyway).
Striking 12, a single act musical set in the present day, takes the Andersen story as its inspiration. Rather than simply retelling the story in a 21st-century setting, though, it instead chooses to illustrate how the tale’s moral can inspire someone to change.
Declan Bennett’s Brendan is spending New Year’s Eve alone, rejecting offers from various friends for sundry reasons, including the chance of bumping into his ex-fiancée. An encounter with a woman selling Christmas lights (Bronté Barbé) inspires him to reread the Danish author’s original story, which Barbé then re-enacts as he reads.
There’s nothing wrong with this overall structure, although the play’s credits suggest it has gone through various significant changes to get here: the play’s book, music and lyrics are credited to Brendan Milburn and Valerie Vigoda, with an additional book and lyrics credit to Rachel Sheinkin. This production’s director, Oliver Kaderbhai, takes a further credit for book adaptation.
It’s thus hard to know who should take responsibility for the show’s biggest mistake, in requiring an onstage narrator. Danielle Kassaraté is a charming figure, but requiring her to recite actions which the characters are quite visibly already performing is a frustration.
More grievously, her character is called upon to inform us of character traits and thoughts which would better be exposed through performance rather than narration.
It is a telling sign that, once the story gets underway, the role of narrator falls away. Indeed, Bennett assumes a narration role of a different form as he reads The Little Match Girl aloud, leaving Kassaraté’s role somewhat redundant.
Musically, there is a modern twang to all the songs, performed by the actor-musician cast along with pianist Andrew Linnie. Milburn, Vigoda and Sheinkin’s music will please musical theatre fans who like tunes that sit somewhere on the scale between Jason Robert Brown and Dougal Irvine.
Alex Lewer’s lighting design compensates for a stage design by Natalie Johnston that doesn’t quite work, comprising as it does a trio of tatty-looking shelves.
A more egregious error, though, is the amplification, which is all over the place. Bennett’s solos are frequently inaudible, especially serious during some of his faster paced numbers where the lyrics require special attention. If those issues were to be ironed out, it would substantially improve a flawed but likeable musical.
Scott Matthewman
Readers may also be interested in:
‘We’ve really been part of the creative process’: Bronté Barbé stars in the brand new UK production of Striking 12 at the Union Theatre – INTERVIEW
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