Review: Blast of nostalgia as Rock Follies claims its place on stage in Chichester

It’s a fabulous blast of nostalgia as Rock Follies – after the best part of five decades – makes it from the TV to the stage in a new musical which is going to be rocking the Minerva until of the month. Adding to the retro fun of the whole thing was the fact that the original writers were there in the audience on Monday, as indeed was the original Q – Rula Lenska. It was lovely to see her mouthing the words to the songs as they tumbled out on stage.

The piece is famously the tale of three girls who, fed up with their awful director on an awful musical, stomp off and set up all-girl rock band – and proceed to confront all the prejudices and obstacles which the 1970s could throw at them. There’s a particularly strong song towards the end of the first half as they start to ascend the stairway to success. Where is the stairway going to lead, the song asks. To glitter and glamour and happiness or to a barred cage? The answer, of course, is both – and that’s the complexity and the intrigue of the tale.

First there is their lecherous, groping would-be manager; then the hilariously bonkers rock star who turns them into his backing singers in the bizarrest of routines. More ominously there’s the serious management which sees their potential, but not quite in the way the girls see it, demoting one of them and bringing in an outsider to turn the trio into a quartet with disastrously damaging consequences. The tale is all about how the girls cope – and this is the strength of the production with the trio beautifully delineated and beautifully played.

Zizi Strallen is Nancy "Q" Cunard, the soft-porn actress, estranged from her family and with a splintered bottom from her fence-sitting, all in the hope of avoiding confrontation on their route to their top. Carly Bawden offers perhaps the most interesting of the three as Anna, the Cambridge graduate who turns to drink and drugs when the management’s manoeuvrings seek to shove her sideways. Completing the trio is Angela Marie Hurst as Dee who offers the powerhouse performance, determined but still principled.

Their clashes with those around them – plus their clashes with each other – give the piece its heart, interspersed with song after song, each one dazzlingly delivered, with the band up high at the back of the stage.

All around them the rest of the company, often multi-roling, provide the eccentric and highly-colourful cast of characters they encounter on their rise and fall and rise again. These are three decent girls confronting an industry and finding their way, trying to stay true to their course in an era when success seemed inevitably to involve selling out.

In some ways it’s a piece which doesn’t quite involve you emotionally in the way the very best theatre does. Probably it does so more if you remember the original television series. But even for those of us don’t, it remains a cracking story crackingly well told, performed with energy, imagination and style and excellently directed by Dominic Cooke.

Tickets from Chichester Festival Theatre box office.

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