This Napoleon chap is suddenly everywhere

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Substacker in possession of a lot of free time for the holidays must be in want of a great show to see, but Isobel McArthur’s adaptation Pride and Prejudice (Sort of…) didn’t really scratch the itch. In Toronto’s Mirvish CAA theatre via the West End, this winner of an Olivier for best comedy and the Evening Standard Theatre Award sounded promising, especially as the Toronto reviews have all been raves. Well, don’t expect any wit: this humour is broad - so broad, the mere introduction of sister number 5 who is fatter than the rest is supposed to make you laugh. She also can’t sing, unlike the rest of them (cue laughter). There’s not a small amount of hamming and monkeying about and I expect that the ideal audience for the play are the tweens and teens and their parents who take them out in hope that they’ll catch a Jane Austen bug.

And they just might. Action-wise, the play follows the novel pretty faithfully (and ends up being overlong as a result). The only thing missing is Mr. Bennet - a recurring joke is that he sits in an armchair, reads the papers, smokes, and never answers back, but the chair is of course empty. The five actresses play all the other characters, men included, and the kudos deservedly go to the team for the fast choreography and the skillful switching. While three people are holding the scene, two that just left through the door are changing for the next set of characters etc. The basic costume for all of the women is a plain white underthing which here passes for a maid’s outfit. The women are all maids, we are told at the start, enacting the P&P but their station doesn’t change much in the story itself. It sort of serves instead as a unifying motif for the beginnings, ends and intervals. This is not a below-the-stairs view of the P&P. 

A great chunk of the music, bizarrely, is standard hits. “You’re so vain”, for example, is a song that Elizabeth sings to Mr. Darcy early on in their acquaintance. There are a number of other famous songs and I wonder if it cost a fortune to obtain the rights. The music is actually at its best when it’s created specifically for the scene; the goofy, awkward trio with a sax that is played in the background as Darcy is ineptly proposing Elizabeth for the first time fits the scene wonderfully. The pop songs, I can take or leave. 

The Napoleonic Wars are going on in the somewhat distant background of P&P but a regiment at one point happens to be stationed near the Bennets’ hometown and the officers play a part in the girls’ social life. Among them, one militia Lieutenant George Wickham who turns out to be a scoundrel who seduces one of the sisters (Darcy saves the day by bribing him with shedloads of money to marry her). In the play he is a redcoat, literally: the actress plays him by wearing a redcoat on top of her white dress and a bit of swagger.  

“The various Napoleonic Wars began properly when Jane [Austen] was seventeen,” writes Lucy Worsley, “and did not end until she was thirty-nine. This meant that in total she only experienced thirteen years of peace out of the forty-one she lived. It also meant that she had the misfortune to come to maturity in a general drought of marriageable men, as the Napoleonic Wars would see military casualties at an average of 20,000 a year.” The Bennet sisters are not a good catch: each is bound to become pretty much homeless after the death of their father because his estate can only be inherited by a male heir. The closest cousin is the unglamourous Mr. Collins whose marriage proposal Elizabeth immediately rejects. The clock to find a suitable match who would not only marry one of the daughters but pull the entire family from the brink is ticking. 

While its action takes place at the same time as P&P, Tolstoy’s War and Peace takes us to a different social circle, free of the money anxieties of the P&P kind. Just about everyone in the 70 pages of the W&P that Dave Malloy uses to create the 2012 musical Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 is an aristocrat, including the (stock character klaxon) scoundrel soldier seducer, Anatole Kuragin. Natasha Rostova, betrothed to the honourable but absent Andrei Bolkonsky (in the book, he’s touring Europe following his father’s wish to pause his fiançailles; in the musical, he’s gone back to war) catches the eye of Anatole and a few balls later, they find themselves planning to elope. Anatole is, turns out, married and has no honourable intentions, and the elopement is stopped by an intervention from Pierre and others. In the best scene of the show, accompanied by a piano only (played by the music director Ryan deSouza), Natasha (Hailey Gillis) and Pierre (Evan Buliung) carry a fraught conversation during which they begin to have an inkling of what they can mean to each other - and what will eventually take place in the W&P. 

Inevitably, there’s a duel scene in the musical, a scene taking place at the opera (during which we learn that opera is weird and liminal), and a massive tutti scene aimed to illustrate how good the Russians are at entertainment and song. Malloy’s musical is, unusually for the genre, through-composed and through-sung, and employs some electronic sounds, but it absolutely is not, as it calls itself, an electropop opera. Opera is the unamplified genre, and it is especially left unamplified in small theatres the size of the main stage at the Crow’s Theatre, but this Chris Abraham production is miked to the hilt, volume blasting the roof off the place in just about every scene but the one with the solo piano. In the chorus scenes you can’t really discern any of the words because they are all smudged into a kind of general noise event. 

The entire experience was unpleasant… worse, stressful, due to the sound only having one mode: blasting. Is this a musical theatre problem, did they all lose their ears at some point and stop noticing the club-level volume? I think not; I remember hearing Amiel Gladstone and Veda Hille’s Onegin in a similarly small place (was it the small stage of the Canadian Stage?) and not being in pain. The thing is, all of those musicians (in addition to the singers, there are a dozen instrumentalists around, also over-volumed, and a blasting percussion set) could easily perform this without any mikes in such a small place, but I expect the composer/librettist specifically calls for miking, because that’s what musical theatre does. They mike. The original production of Natasha and Pierre, btw, took place in a much larger theatre. 

And the libretto? There are parts apparently taken verbatim from W&P, but there are also some odd original lyrics here and there, intended to be too approachable and pop-y perhaps, like the introductory lines for each of the characters. X is good, Y is young, Z is absent, and Hélène is a slut. Pardon me? “I am a slut”, Helene introduces herself (Divine Brown, Pierre’s unfaithful wife Helene in this production, probably the best singer on cast, was tasked with making these lyrics make some remote sense.) When did we agree that “slut” is reclaimed and normal? How very the early 2000s of the libretto. 

So that’s me, stressed out and half-deaf after Natasha and Pierre and the Comet (the comet appears at the end as Pierre philosophizes about his place in the world and observes the sky). Now, Malloy’s latest effort as a composer and co-lyricist with Lucy Kirkwood is The Witches after Roald Dahl, a musical playing until the end of January at the UK’s National Theatre and the reviews have been ecstatic. I would go see that, given half the chance - but at the NT’s Olivier or Stratford’s Tom Patterson Theatre, not anywhere smaller. And only if the sound is balanced.

It was inevitable, then, for me to go see Ridley Scott’s Napoleon at the movies, after many weeks of avoiding it. I’ve heard bad things. Scott himself was stupidly touchy when historians commented how inaccurate the film is (“Were you there? Then shut the f**k up.” Charming.) The NYT dedicated a longread to how much the French culturati hated and mocked the film. The actress cast as Josephine, Vanessa Kirby, is much younger and prettier than the actual Josephine would have been (in real life, she was older than Napoleon and had bad teeth). But with this much Napoleon in the background lately, I had no choice but to see the obvious thing that puts him in the foreground.

And y’know what? The film is actually half decent. It’s good to have your expectations lowered from time to time, and then find yourself surprised, isn’t it? Joaquin Phoenix is excellent in the role, not least for his rudimentary and gruff manner of speaking (Napoleon was not French and his spoken and written French was fairly Corsican). Kirby was OK - Rupert Everett (!) as Wellington was harmless too - but every supporting role shone brightly, esp. Robespierre, Sieyès, Talleyrand, and the young Russian Czar Alexander. 

The film wants us to believe that Napoleon was equally motivated by the desire for his wife as he was by his idea of France and his political and military ambitions, which, come on. It wants us to believe that he abandoned his troops in Egypt because of the rumour that Josephine acquired a boyfriend back home. (Come on.) No, he never shot cannonballs at the pyramids. But the battle scenes only are worth the price of admission. The Toulon battle was just an amuse bouche for what was to come: Austerlitz, Borodino (to jump back to Tolstoy, it’s where Andrei and Anatole both get seriously injured), and Waterloo. I’d like to believe no CGI was (over)used for those scenes, because they don’t look video-gamey at all. 

And Napoleonic warfare changed the nature of warfare itself. As Margaret MacMillan explains it in her 2018 Reith Lectures (and elsewhere), prior to the period, warfare was mainly done by a distinct group of people, the aristocratic warrior class. This status carried its obligations and its privileges. The era of nations and of electoral democracies with expanding franchise - the two developed symbiotically - introduced mass mobilization. All of us men citizens, and all of us men potential soldiers. 

Some of this is hinted at in the film - and the fact that people around Europe fangirled over Napoleon as if he were a rock star. (The young Beethoven and the young Hegel included.) But the movie isn’t really interested in what lasting changes Napoleonic reign introduced to jurisprudence, the status of non-Catholic minorities, economy, schooling, or the colonies. 

Here, he is a surprisingly emotional (so many tears!) rube. And as such, weirdly compelling.

Finally, a nod to whoever was in charge of the soundtrack: all the pieces playing in the background of scenes on the tinkly harpsichord, on the strings, they are all of the era. The music goes Russian from Borodino on and those folk and Orthodox chant-like melodies recur as musical motifs until the end. Purcell’s “The Cold Song” as a hint that Josephine is dying was sheer brilliance.