Picture: Jane Hobson
The Sorrows of Satan, a musical play is streaming until 9 May 2021.
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
This glossy production, filmed in the grandeur of the ballroom at that stately Hertfordshire pile Brocket Hall, is a streamed version of a show that premiered at the cosy off-West End Tristran Bates Theatre in 2017.
It collected excellent reviews then for its wit and elegance and the same director, Adam Lenson, is again in charge but with the significant difference of having its writers Michael Conley (book and lyrics) and Luke Bateman (music) enacting their own labours as 50% of the cast of four. Both multi-taskers are in top form.
Borrowing the storyline from Marie Corelli’s Faust-inspired 19th century best-seller of the same name but bringing the action forward from 1895 to 1924 when the class structure in British society was far more pronounced than it is today, they have come up with a stylish concoction that wears its 110 minutes well.
For the other half of the cast, they have the delightful Molly Lynch, down on the cast list as ‘Woman’ but revelling in not one but three roles, and that man of many parts, Stefan Bednarczyk, cabaret star, actor, teacher, church organist to name but four, is the piano-playing mute Amiel who sells his soul to the devil in return for a wonderful life but instead is typically double-crossed.
We first see Lynch as the bored, born-to-privilege Lady Sybil, then as successful musical theatre writer Mavis Clare, and finally almost as her Irish self, a star-struck young actress auditioning for a part, who finally says the words “I absolutely love you, Mr Tempest” that the insecure Geoffrey is so desperate to hear.
Bateman is Geoffrey Tempest, the penniless writer of underwhelming stage musicals obsessed with his “artistic integrity” while Conley is the satanic Prince Lucio, his wealthy patron, who dumps all Geoffrey’s clunky lyrics and replaces them with his own wittier compositions in the show-within-a-show they are rehearsing.
Poor Geoffrey can’t take his work being taken apart and each time the Prince of Darkness’ songs replace his own, he goes off to be sick.
They say the devil always gets the best tunes and Lucio is happy to have his work credited to Geoffrey if it means the show is a success. It’s a straight swap – artistic integrity versus fame and fortune. Talk of the devil…
After a slow start, ‘Satan’ really comes to life with Conley’s big number ‘Tar-Tar-Tar-Tartarus’, which, not being a student of Greek, I thought was about a blissful island somewhere nice and hot – it’s hot, right enough, but not nice. Tartarus is, I now know, a dungeon of torment, a place where souls are judged after death. That’s by the way but it is a cracking song brilliantly performed by the versatile Conley.
Bateman has a show-stopper of his own in Act II, donning a top hat for an unexpectedly nimble song-and-dance routine. It is no surprise they work well together as they also collaborated on The Little Beasts, Personality and The Fabulist Fox Sister.
After being brutally rewritten, poor Geoffrey has reluctantly to admit all his songs sound the same saying “what’s a voice if no one can hear it”. There are plenty more neat lines – Lady Sybil’s “I’d rather be looked over than overlooked” and “No, I’m not a Christian, I’m English” are just two.
It’s clever and amusing stuff rather than laugh-out-loud hilarious but works on its own level. I loved her finding Geoffrey “interesting” simply because he’s poor and far removed from the hooray Henrys and Henriettas she meets in her emotionally-vacant high society.
As tough cookie Mavis, she finds the prevalent male attitude to women insulting and outdated and defends her use of scantily-clad chorus girls as accentuating the beauty of the female sex. The engaging Lynch has great fun with all her roles and it’s a pity we don’t hear even more of her fine singing voice.
Despite supposedly not being able to speak, Bednarczyk is somehow allowed two funny songs, the second a patter song at the top of Act II about how his life has been derailed which has a Gilbert and Sullivan feel to it. He is right at home in that genre as a well-known interpreter of the Noel Coward and Flanders and Swann songbooks.
Gorgeous Brocket Hall rates an inspired choice as the backdrop for this over-the-top romp that starts gingerly but gets better the longer it goes. Subtitled “a hell of a comedy about a devil of a musical”, that’s about right even though it’s more a play with music than a full-blown musical.
Jeremy Chapman
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