Review: Assassins in Chichester – a ghastly misjudgement

Chichester Festival Theatre promise a surreal carnival and they certainly deliver it, the theatre utterly transformed from the moment you walk into a foyer all decked out in stars and stripes. And then, as soon as you take your seat, the party starts with a set which leaves you marvelling at the theatre’s untold possibilities. A few of them are realised here. It really is remarkable. And some of the cast are already up there getting you in the mood. It’s a fabulous vibe.

Did you ever imagine that a CFT company would urge you to create a sweeping Mexican wave – wine tightly clenched between your knees – while the quaintly-titled song She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy blasts out through the speakers. And then we count down to the show itself to the accompaniment of Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet. And what a cracking track that is.

And then it begins, boldly and brilliantly as our host for the night – Peter Forbes as The Proprietor – cleverly, very cleverly assembles all the people that have ever killed or attempted to kill a president. And then we get Danny Mac – superb on his Chichester debut, playing John Wilkes Booth – trying to persuade us that he killed Lincoln to make the world a better place and not just because he had had a run of bad reviews. But then suddenly and catastrophically, Stephen Sondheim’s musical – with book by John Weidman – nosedives. Of course, the best theatre shocks and even disturbs, but the point is that the best theatre does so for a reason. It does so in a way which is insightful, which illuminates the great imponderables of the human condition and also the awful things we do and why we do them. It also, you’d like to think, explores the big questions in a way which touches us.

However, the most disturbing thing here is that this whole show ever made it onto the page, let alone the stage. An electric chair appears and someone is duly executed in it. Is Sondheim/the production showing us this because the electric chair is an abomination which shames every single citizen of the United States? No, it’s played for cheap thrills. Soon afterwards, another character sings and dances his way up to the gallows and actually places a noose around his own neck. It’s not the reason I go to the theatre. You sit there wondering what on earth the actor is thinking in that moment. Of course, your response to it all will depend how close you have come to violent crime, how much you realise that nothing is ever the same again, not least for the survivors. At any point the show could have salvaged something by actually saying something. Sadly it chooses not to.

Barely a day goes by without yet another High School shooting. Those ghastly images of Shinzo Abe’s last moments are surely seared into the minds of so many of us. The thought of the murder of Sir David Amess still chills to the core. And here we have such things wrapped up as song and dance. And then it gets even worse. We get, on two big screens, the actual moment of JFK’s murder. Let’s stress it. The very moment in which he is shot in the head is projected onto two big screens as part of the finale to a musical. The production is stylish and it is classily done and it’s mostly well acted (Danny Mac is brilliant). But it is also a horrid misjudgement from all concerned to have placed it before us.

Phil Hewitt