"Evita". Oxford Playhouse

This review was written for Daily Information and appears on their website.

I left Evita tonight in a state of overpowering confusion. I’d just watched one of the most famous musicals of the last fifty years for the first time in my life, and I hadn’t really followed it at all. The audience around me were cheering like the Argentinian electorate taken in by Eva Perón’s glamour, a dull clink resonating from the disposable champagne flutes allowed into the auditorium as they toasted the performance. But I. Just. Didn’t. Get it.

The Oxford Operatic Society without doubt has the highest standards. For an amateur organisation they’re a lot more professional than many theatre companies. The programme positively oozes with ability, each of the creative team involved having years of varied and impressive experience. The performers were not just talented but also bursting with enthusiasm. The company even has a Travel Package Scheme, which picks up audiences at designated points around the country, bussing them into Oxford for the show. They are, objectively, amazing.

So why did I feel like I was on the outside looking in? Let me try and unpack this a bit.

First of all, Evita is Donald Trump’s favourite musical. He’s seen it, apparently, six times. Perhaps this isn’t so surprising, when you consider that it’s a musical about a couple who use populism to advance their own careers and relentlessly ransack the state while staying beloved and popular. The most famous song, Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina (repeated at least four times over the course of the evening by the way) is a cynical exercise in crowd manipulation, underlined by Eva immediately afterwards instructing her PR team, ‘They need to adore me, so Christian Dior me’. I can see that speaking to Trump.

Amazingly, it was also Margaret Thatcher’s favourite musical. She was in awe of it, writing afterwards, ‘If we apply the same perfection to our message, we should provide quite good historic material for an opera called Margaret in 30 years time.’

Clearly something in the worldview of former Tory peer Andrew Lloyd-Webber was speaking to these right-wing stalwarts – but not to me. It might also explain why, when Eva fell from power at the end, I didn’t feel any sympathy at all.

Secondly, despite the undoubted talent on display, one of the shortcomings of the production was that it was frequently impossible to understand the words that were being sung. The balance of orchestra to voice? A slight imperfection in the diction? Or just the simple fact that singing isn’t as easy to follow as speaking? Whatever the reason, this meant that any subtleties in the plot were lost. And Tim Rice’s lyrics gorge on subtlety. On the way home I read the synopsis of the show on Wikipedia, and I could hardly believe I’d watched the same musical. The broad brushstrokes were there (‘she goes on a tour of Europe’, ‘she falls ill’) but much of the motivation was either absent or inaccessible. For example, at one point Eva apparently reassures Juan Perón of his chances of winning the election before organising rallies and giving the descamisados hope for a better future, while Perón and his allies plot to dispose of anyone who stands in their way. That certainly didn’t come across – although I did see some dancing military figures. This is an entirely sung show, with no spoken sections at all, so, as with opera, surtitles would help audiences pick up the detail.

The cast for this production was enormous. The programme lists seventy-five performers. At times the stage looked more like Oxford Circus underground station than Buenos Aires, and the Playhouse’s maw-like orchestra pit seemed ready to swallow any hapless ensemble member who got squeezed too near the edge. But more doesn’t necessarily mean better. The dancing was enthusiastic but uninspired, and the sheer multitudes of bodies meant that nobody stood out.

Evita is still dusted off and performed pretty regularly. But I believe production companies have a responsibility to think about their choices, and to consider the modern world into which they are projecting them. There was, for example, a Jamie Lloyd version at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre a few years ago that was described as ‘smart, timely and stylistically groundbreaking’. The director’s notes for tonight’s production make some truly excellent points about taking a more complex and subtle approach to women’s roles in 2023 than in the past. But, tonight at least, these aspirations sadly did not quite translate onto the stage. I think Che the narrator got it right when he sang, ‘And no, and yes, and no, and yes, and no…. a qualified: yes.’