Assassins, Menier Chocolate Factory

By E. L Hardy

Stephen Sondheim has woven a career out of broken dreams and the equable relationship between high expectations and bitter disappointment...

Into The Woods: a contortion of classic fairy tales which opens and closes with a futile 'I wish.' Company: a miserable exploration of marriage and extended bachelorhood.

Sunday in the Park with George: the portrait of the tortured artist, misunderstood, criticised, cold, revered only in death.

You couldn't accuse Sondheim of inanity. He might write musicals, but life ain't no carousel.

This thread - realistic to some, cynical to others - gives Sondheim's work an edge, an uncomfortable dissonance that has, thus far, saved him from the hyperactively moneyed realm of commerciality. It is frustrating that such genius is not rewarded on the same scale as the meteoric mediocrity that so often prevails, but Sondheim's work exists in a realm of its own and isn't supposed to be for everyone. If accustomed to escapist, romanticised musical theatre, you might not wish to think of Prince Charming as a compulsive adulterer, for example, or learn, as we do in Merrily We Roll Along, that even the best 'old friends' turn their backs in favour of fame. And you probably won't suffer the implication that the man who shot the President did so, not out of madness or innate evil, but for reasons closer to our comprehension - reasons we might even be able to relate to.

John Weidman and Stephen Sondheim's Assassins gives a voice to the dismissed and the despised, the misfits and the unworthy, who have shot (or attempted to shoot) a President. The 10 characters are guilty of intent to commit murder, and 4 of them are successful in doing so. However, as the matted narrative untangles, we learn a thing or two about our gunmen and women; things that the history books would rather gloss over. But what if these desperate men and women had something legitimate to say? Sooner than duck away from that potentially negative reality, Weidman and Sondheim, without glorifying anyone's malevolent crimes, reveal a fractured, hypocritical society, for which these disappointed and desperate few are not entirely to blame.

The furiously felt hopelessness of our assassins is captured, framed and magnified in Jamie Lloyd's pellucid, magnificent and grim production. The skeleton of a fairground - once bright and tuneful, lies derelict and decayed. The fairground's clown (Proprietor played by Simon Lipkin) - once embodying his painted smile, is now tattered and smeared; dishevelled from the heavy burden of all that he has seen and all that he knows. The scene is sardonically accompanied by Sondheim's stirring, patriotic score - his other, angrier National Anthem - an anthem that tells of the "poor man's pain." Jubilant trumpets play upbeat marches, creating a irksome paradox with what we see on stage - an excitable army of civilians, lined up, each with newly acquired guns in their sweaty palms, preparing to shoot. (This conceit has more recently been employed by Kander & Ebb in their Scottsboro Boys. Maybe musical theatre is the form to make us sit up and pay attention after all?)

The vivid clarity achieved by Lloyd and his explosive company propels the story outward; there is no way to deafen the high octane frustration or to avoid comparing their discontentment to our own - our strained political system just 6 months shy of the next general election. It is disturbing, the ease with which we empathise with Samuel Byck's eloquent retorts on the political failings of the President he'd voted for. Byck (played exquisitely by Mike McShane) gives an insightful and almost rational argument. There is painful verisimilitude too in his extreme and obsessive message of admiration to Leonard Bernstein. Had he not been dressed as Santa, sitting in a disused bumper car, someone might have listened to him. The same goes for Italian born Giuseppe Zangara (Stewart Clarke) and Polish Leon Czolgosz (David Roberts) - their illusions of finding the American Dream in the Land of Opportunity dashed. "It's a free country! That was a joke." Silenced by their misfortune, their position in the food chain, their passionate belief in the interests of an unachievable cause, they persuade themselves that there is no option other than to shoot. And until the moment we see it happen, we too are persuaded.

We are disarmed by Charles Guiteau's (Andy Nyman) optimism and idiosyncrasy, and John Wilkes Booth's (Aaron Tveit) apparent heroism. Both men - with their propensity for extremism - yearn for heavenly immortality within the pages of history. Likewise, the devoted, if maniacal 'teenage slut' Lynette 'Squeaky' Fromme (Carly Bawden) and 'stupid housewife' Sara Jane Moore (Catherine Tate) are really just daughters who couldn't live up to the expectations of their daddies. And then the contemporary notion of fame comes into play - the appeal of becoming a contributor to planetary events. As Martin Amis explains, "To feel that you are a geohistorical player is a tremendous lure to those condemned, as they see it, to exclusion and anonymity."

Offset against this dangerous persuasiveness is the Banjo strumming, denim-clad Balladeer (Jamie Parker) who, with no time to indulge acts of madness, would sooner burn Booth's stories than risk corroboration. He tunefully dismisses him instead: "Every now and then a madman 's bound to come along." A chipper troop of saccharine, smug and vain bystanders take pleasure in being present at the attempted shooting of Roosevelt. However, even these vapid civilians feel the impact of the hit later, noticeably shaken by the unmistakeable paradigm shift resulting from the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. Lloyd's staging and the ensemble's stillness in this moment evoke the sense of atmospheric pollution. Their ideals, the fundamental principles on which America is based, shaken.

Violent crimes themselves, once committed, undermine and overwrite their original purpose; these guilty gunmen and women were all either imprisoned or silenced in death, but Sondheim and Weidman have preserved the motivation behind their terrible acts in savagely dark, musical theatre form, daring fascinated audiences to listen. It is rational, when contemplating intense violence, to ask 'why would anyone do this?' Still, what is the purpose of examining the reasons behind actions that do not themselves deal in reason? In our empathetic response, it is too easy to forget that what we are dealing with here is a cult of death, and where's the reason in that?

PS. in short: Another fearless tempest of a production courtesy of Jamie Lloyd and the Menier Chocolate Factory. "Attention has been paid."