Corona Diary: Jesus Christ

Cold, cold, cold, cold, cold. Well, you wouldn’t expect a bank holiday to actually be sunny, would you?
We spent Easter upholding the old traditions. In other words, we ate chocolate and watched Jesus Christ Superstar on the telly. Not the classic film version, this was the big stage production at the O2, with Tim Minchin, and Mel C from the Spice Girls and a weirdly mixed metaphor about climate change.
It was on YouTube. It’s amazing what you can find on YouTube nowadays. The previous night, we watched Jane Eyre at the National. Well, attempted to watch. After last week’s success with One Man, Two Guvnor’s, I was starting to think we were properly arty and into the theatre. Well, not arty enough for Jane Eyre, it turns out. I knew it was going to be a challenge when it opened to the lead actress walking around the stage shout ‘Waah, waah,’ while the rest of the cast proclaimed ‘It’s a girl’. I had a horrible feeling I was about to be subjected to some ‘acting’.
I wasn’t wrong. Rather than that boring old business of telling a story, it seemed to be just a collection of Jane Eyre greatest hits: a sequence of cameos trying to portray the sense rather than the events of Jane growing up via the medium of unsubtle lighting effects, barely-there characters and pointless drama games from theatre school. I may have enjoyed the interlude during the trip to the orphanage when the cast suddenly and inexplicably turned into sheep, but it didn’t further the plot very much. I knew it wasn’t the play for me when, after struggling with it for an hour, I turned to Sue to say, ‘it’s not working for me. I’m going to go do something else,’ and she turned back with wide eyes and said ‘but the story’s just about to start’.
For Jesus Christ Superstar, the tables were very much turned. This time, it was me trying to watch the production, while Sue moaned in the background about how boring it was. Actually, she mostly just went to sleep. It was Joe who spent the whole time moaning, firstly about the frequency of camera angle changes (in one scene he counted 82, and I was delighted to hear him counting every one of them while I was trying to listen to the music), and then secondly about, ironically, the fact that it was just a sequence of set pieces in search of a plot.
Given that I hate musicals, it’s perhaps odd that I quite like JSC (we’re on first initial terms now). Firstly, I do like the plot. I rather like the twin conceit. Secondly, that Judas is acting not out of jealousy or greed but because he genuinely fears that Jesus, by becoming bigger than the ideas that he is preaching, is about to destroy the ideology and movement that they fought so hard to bring about. Secondly, I love the idea that Jesus, being God, knows exactly what is about to happen. He knows that Judas will betray him, knows that the apostles will scatter, turning away from him when he needs them and, most importantly, that he will die suffering on a cross. Understandably, this makes him a little distracted, and hard for the others to engage with.
This didn’t come across well in the performance we were watching. Not for want of Judas. Tim Minchin was a revelation. I knew he could sing, but wow. He blew the roof off. Which made it even more of a shame that Jesus couldn’t keep up with him. JSC is often described as a rock opera, which basically translates to a lot of Iron Maiden like falsetto screams. In the right hands, this sounds amazing. In the hands, or vocal cords, of Ben Forster it sounded like he was trying to do the women’s bit in Life of Brian. It didn’t help that he has a startling resemblance to Matt Berry (Douglas Reynholm) from the IT crowd. When he pronounced the line ‘You want me to die?’ I couldn’t help but hear it in the mellifluous yet overdramatic tones of Matt Berry’s voice. Given the nature of the show, I half expected him to drop to his knees, raise his hands to the sky and shout hammily ‘Father!!!’.
Still, you can’t beat a good bit of Andrew Lloyd Webber passion play on a Sunday afternoon. After that, a phone call with the parents, and an Easter treat hunt with the cat, I felt we’d give Easter a pretty good go. Back to normality now, or whatever passes for it these days.
I wonder if they have any left over chocolate in the shops.