Mamma Mia



Mamma Mia! What an ordeal

This musical is successful, charming and brilliant — if you have breasts and a fondness for Swedish pop music

Jeremy Clarkson

My youngest daughter was adamant. For her birthday treat she wanted to see the stage version of Mamma Mia!. In other words, she wanted me to drive her 70 miles to London. To find a parking space. To have a horrible lunch from the kids’ menu. And then she wanted to go to a stage play in which people burst into song for no reason.

I dislike musicals on an industrial level. The Sound of Music could have been a good film but it was ruined by Julie Andrews running around on a hillside taking 20 minutes to sing what could have been said in five with a well-oiled Schmeisser machine pistol.

And musicals are so much worse in the theatre because the actors are actually there, and good manners means you can’t fall asleep. Well, you can, and I did in Miss Saigon, but you are inevitably roused from the land of nod when someone decides they can say something better with a song.

To my mind, the world would be a much better place if Messrs Gilbert and Sullivan had been imprisoned at a very early age. And if Andrew Lloyd Webber — whom I like very much as a chap — had been born deaf.

But there is nothing that Gilbert, Lloyd Webber, Rodgers, Rice, Sullivan or Hammerstein could have conceived that could even get close to the remorselessly twee and hateful Mamma Mia!.

Unlike almost anyone else with an Adam’s apple, I have actually seen the cinematic version of this production and, as a result, I was truly horrified by the prospect of seeing it live. I am not exaggerating. I felt as if my doctor had just used the c-word — breathless and weak with horror and dread.

“Why don’t we go ice skating instead?” I asked my beaming daughter, in the way a condemned man might ask for another punishment while climbing the steps of the gallows. “Or what about Laser Quest? You like Laser Quest.”

But she had the measure of me. “No, Dad. You like Laser Quest.”

I then went berserk. Why don’t we go skiing? Why don’t we spend a month in Mustique and you can have as many milk shakes as you like? Would you like a car? A rhino — you like animals? Your own air force? Anything? Anything. Just not Mamma Mia!. I sank to my knees. I pleaded. I whimpered. I begged. But it was all hopeless. She wanted to see people bursting into song for no reason.

Of course, when you are dreading something on this level, it’s never as bad as you think it’s going to be. I consoled myself with that thought as I drove to London, found a parking space, had a horrible lunch from the kids’ menu and then headed listlessly, like a cow on the way to slaughter, to the theatre.

Where there was a surprise in store. It was, indeed, just as bad as I’d feared and in places it was quite a bit worse.

I don’t see the point of the story at all. A woman had slept with three men at some point in her drug-addled past and now the daughter was determined to find out which one was her dad. Get a DNA test done, love, and spare us the misery. But no, she invites them all to a party at her mum’s gaff in the land of the Shirley Valentine and ... I’m not going to give away the ending because I was in a taxi when it happened.

There are no jet fighters. Mark Wahlberg does not shoot someone’s arm off from a thousand yards away. And no one is left in the Atacama desert with nothing but a can of motor oil. This, then, is a production aimed exclusively at women.

And, boy, does it work. There were thousands in there, cramped after the long coach trip from Wakefield and determined to get some circulation back into their bingo wings by bouncing up and down in time to the music.

Now I’m no architect but I know an army breaks step when marching over a bridge because the rhythmic pounding can cause it to collapse. I was therefore so worried the ceaseless bouncing would bring the circle down, it took me a while to realise Abba wrote a collection of quite good pop songs that have nothing to do with one another.

Trying to mould them into a story is like trying to mould everything in your fridge into a meal. Two or three ingredients may go together but then the chocolate Crunch Corner is going to ruin it. So you end up with lines such as: “Hmmm. So that’s what it’s like at Waterloo. Tell me. Have you ever had a dream?” Which links us via the cocktail sausages and the blancmange into I Have a Dream. It’s as ridiculous as trying to make all the columns I write into a book. Ooops. I mean a novel . . .

Halfway through the first act, I decided to dispense with good manners and go to sleep but the enormous northern woman in the next seat ensured this didn’t happen by banging her phlebitis-ridden thigh into me in time to Voulez-Vous.

In the second act, I experimented with the idea that a human being can will itself to death. However, this requires a level of concentration that is impossible to achieve when your knees are being bashed in four time by the back of the seat in front. So I had to content myself with a simple and fervent hope that the Prince of Wales Theatre would fall down.

I even texted a chap who runs the building, to ask if such a thing were possible, but he assured me that during its renovation it was strengthened to accommodate a houseful of bouncing fatties. So, in the third act, knowing that unconsciousness through either sleep or death was impossible, I simply gave my wife the car keys and left.

Here’s the funny thing, though. I would say Mamma Mia! is the most successful, charming and brilliant piece of art currently showing in Britain. Partly this is because it is — if you have breasts and a fondness for Swedish pop music. But mostly it’s because I’ve always wanted to see one of my quotes on a billboard outside a theatre. And I don’t think “I hated it” would make the grade.

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