"Our House". Oxford Playhouse

You might think that, with Guys and Dolls in full swing at Queen’s College, there wouldn’t be enough dancing, singing, saxophoning students left to fill another musical in the same week. You’d be wrong. The stage of the Oxford Playhouse is thronging with yet another talented company of performers as they blast their way through the Madness jukebox musical Our House.

Our House came out in 2003, when every vintage band from the 80s had to have a musical based on their greatest hits just to keep up with the Bennys and Björns. But where Mamma Mia transports Abba’s music far from Sweden, and exploits the full range of their output, from ballad to disco, Our House is a morality tale from the streets of Camden, the (literal) stomping ground of Suggs and his merry men. And it embraces the fact that most of Madness’s music was high-octane ska.

The plot follows a London likely lad, Joe Casey (played by first-year undergraduate Alex Innes) who gets into scrapes with the local crime lords, falls in love with his childhood sweetheart Sarah (Maya Flint), and is the wormy apple of his mother Cath (Harriet Wilson)’s eye. Throughout, Joe is guided by the spirit of his dead, departed and distinctly dodgy dad (Tristan Hood). So far so straightforward.

But Our House has an extension. After the first few scenes, Joe splits in two. One version of him becomes a responsible, self-sacrificing citizen; the other a sociopathic chancer. And the plot weaves his two alternative lives together. Only one will lead to true happiness in the end. I wonder if you can guess which.

For Alex Innes, this means more costume changes than London Fashion Week, as he switches between spivvy black leathers and honest-but-tasteless tracksuit, with bewildering speed. But Innes, like the entire cast, is brimming with the energy of Los Palmas Seven, and he doesn’t miss a cue.

Energy is the touchstone of this production. It has countless mass dance routines, choreographed with inch-perfect precision by Wren Talbot-Ponsonby, and often incorporating props, from cars to boats along the River Nile. It looks like a professional production. With Louis Benneyworth and Nicole Palka in charge of the music, it sounds like a professional production. And with the vocal and movement talents of a huge cast of 30, it has the scale of Les Misérables. Added to which, the simple but effective two-level set, incorporating the humble dwellings of working-class Casey Street, not only looks great, but also gives this huge ensemble room to manoeuvre.

So it should be wonderful. But something is holding it back, and that something is not the production, but the material itself. Our House has divided critics and audiences since its first performance. Some see it as the perfect embodiment of Madness translated into theatre, others a travesty. And it’s not very hard to see why.

The good-path-bad-path device certainly has potential, and could have all the fun of a 1980s Fighting Fantasy adventure book. But in the normally capable hands of writer Tim Firth, it emerges as both overcomplicated in performance and preachily simplistic in tone. It’s like a moral lesson for toddlers: clever in concept, clunky in reality.

It’s also problematic that the switches between good path and bad path are surprisingly hard to spot (especially since Joe sometimes changes into other outfits than his usual ones). You can be half-way through a song, and suddenly realise that the story flipped without warning. At the interval I overheard an audience member explaining to his confused friends that a cast member had told him you have to look out for whether Joe walks through the left or right door on the stage, and spot which of them has a light on behind it. That tells you which alternative universe we’re in. Really? I checked in the second half, and that was indeed the clue. Given the sheer amount of things to look at on stage in this show, it’s a detail that’s easy to miss.

But more fundamentally, Madness’s music just doesn’t sound quite right for this treatment. These are pop songs, not soundtracks. And here they’re stretched, like a prisoner on the rack, into repeating themes, reprises, overtures and leitmotifs. They get put through the musical wringer, and it squeezes the life out of them. There’s also a law of diminishing returns in effect: with so many big numbers, and so many routines featuring all 30 performers dancing together, there’s no sense of shape to the show. It’s climax after climax. And that’s exhausting.

There are 22 Madness songs in this show, and – wonderful though they are – put together like this exposes their lack of variety. Moreover, several of them are crowbarred in for reasons that make little sense in the context of the story itself. One character says, ‘Hey, would you like to have a drive in my car?’ and hey presto, we’re into I Like Driving In My Car, complete with a rear projection of London streets from the 1980s (weirdly shot in reverse for no reason I could discern).

One exception to this, and for me, the high point of the show, is the simple duet between Joe and Sarah on a park bench where they sing It Must Be Love (tellingly, a Madness cover of Labu Siffre’s 1971 original). Without the big production, the song is able to breathe. It’s a melodic island in a sea of baggy trousers.

So ironically, the one thing truly missing from Our House is... madness. Look back at some of those original videos. You’ll see a saxophone player emerging from a car engine compartment in I Like Driving In My Car. You’ll see band members with ping pong balls in their mouths, buried up to their necks in sand in Night Boat To Cairo. You’ll see Suggs doing his unique robot-on-acid foot-shuffle. Their style, their appeal, their very identity, was built on cheerful, rib-nudging insanity. Our House dispenses with all that in favour of safe-playing, West End blancmange. Arguably this is a necessary part of the jukeboxification process, and many lovers of mainstream musicals welcome and cherish it. But compared with some of writer Tim Firth’s other work (Calendar Girls, All Quiet on the Preston Front) it’s more of a living endorsement than a house of fun. Madi Bouchta’s production is infused with passion. But it lacks the inspired kernel of silliness that made Madness truly the nuttiest sound around.