Treason: The Musical in Concert – Cadogan Hall

Waylon Jacobs, Emmanuel Kojo, Bradley Jaden and Oliver Tompsett in Treason The Musical In Concert at Cadogan Hall, London. Picture: Gavin Nugent

Treason: The Musical in Concert at Cadogan Hall, London.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

In current times with theatres closed and only online options available, getting attention to new works of musical theatre can be even harder than usual – not that they were ever easy.

Ricky Allan and Kieran Lynn’s Treason: The Musical is a case in point. Several tracks from the musical, which explores the people behind the Gunpowder Plot and their thinking, have been released as studio recordings on streaming platforms. A concert showcase would be a good way of drumming up further interest, but with venues closed that must instead take place online.

And that is what producer Stephen McGill and director Hannah Chissick have achieved. Delayed by a month because of changing Covid restrictions, the team behind Treason pull together an impressive cast list to showcase a musical that plants its roots in English folk tradition, before spreading out to encompass other genres.

Allan and Lynn’s book starts at the end, with first Rebecca LaChance’s Anne Vaux and, then, Lucie Jones as Martha Percy lamenting the executions of the men – Martha’s husband Thomas (Bradley Jaden) among them – convicted of plotting to blow up the state opening of Parliament, the death of King James being their ultimate goal.

We then flash back to two years before to 1603, to the final years of Elizabeth’s reign. Persecution of Catholics was rife, and hope for relief from oppression lay with Scotland’s King James VI, heir to the childless Elizabeth’s throne. Cedric Neal plays The Earl, the instigator and financier of the plot (unnamed in the show, this seems to be Thomas’ cousin Henry Percy) who persuades Thomas to approach James.

The King we meet, in a deliciously camp performance by Daniel Boys, is a freewheeling, flirtatious soul. In the musical theatre monarchical line, he seems to be a direct descendant of Jesus Christ Superstar’s Herod and Hamilton’s King George, with a flourish of Cabaret’s Emcee for good measure.

Musically, the light syncopation of Boys’ performance provides an effective counterpoint to the more sobering melodies of the English plotters. But that exists only for one song, and from then on the musical settles into the hopes, fears and eventual actions of the plotters and their families.

The story propels forward under the rhyming narration of Debris Stevenson’s narrator. Stevenson is a poet by trade, and that element of her performance is utilised effectively here, with passages that move from flowing lyricism to staccato beats to signify a ride on horseback, and moving into full rap mode as the Catholic noblemen are forced underground and they consider themselves betrayed by the King who promised things would change.

It is here that Oliver Tompsett takes centre stage as Robert Catesby, as he and his co-conspirators – Jaden, Waylon Jacobs, and Emmanuel Kojo – formulate their plan in ‘Take Things Into Our Own Hand’.

But while Allan’s music and lyrics provide stirring numbers, it feels like the connective tissue is missing. We go straight from King James’ promise, to Elizabeth’s death, to discussing James’s assassination, with no real sense of emotional progression.

As Allan and Lynn move from a 45-minute concert to a full-length musical, one hopes that progression receives more attention. We also get no sense of why the roguish James, whom Boys’ only song encourages us to warm to, should be a justifiable target in Catesby’s eyes.

Those deficiencies aside, it is when Tompsett takes the lead that Treason finds its true leading man. ‘Blind Faith’ is another beautiful duet between Jones and Jaden, the former espousing her devotion to her husband, while Jaden’s Thomas professes the same feelings towards Tompsett’s charismatic antihero. These are relationship that, like the progression towards the formation of the plot, deserve more stage time than the concert gives them, but Jaden in particular is able to compensate.

Another thing that Treason also suffers from is an unavoidable piece of history – that the plot failed, the conspirators found, and anti-Catholic feeling became ever more entrenched. These events are covered in Stevenson’s narrative. It does feel as if we ought to stay with these characters more, to hear the story from their mouths rather than a disassociated narrator.

We are promised a full musical production of Treason: The Musical in 2021/22. On the face of this production, Allan and Lynn have hit upon a period of British history that has the potential to be an explosive piece of musical theatre. But while this concert version gives glimpses of what might be, one also comes away with the feeling that it, like the Gunpowder Plot, has not yet achieved its goals.

Scott Matthewman