Emily Hill
posted 25 October 2006

It's a truth universally acknowledged that any piece of exuberant musical theatre, written in rhyming couplets and staged in a pub in Hoxton adorned with fake palm trees, has to be goddamn awful, isn't it? If one were to add that the plot is borrowed from Greek myth, the show tunes veer into belting soul at the thrum of a double bass, and the staging is just short of rustic, it just sounds like a car crash doesn't it?

Well, it's not. Hermes at the Rosemary Branch is quite simply the best piece of musical theatre you're going to see this year. Forget Spamalot, forget Chicago: Hermes is a true original, the real deal.

It starts off slow, you're not expecting much - there's only half an audience crammed onto the soft furnishings; the lights dim, a striking woman dressed as a 1920s showgirl, perched next to her live band, croons a sultry little number about the 'privilege of being misunderstood.' A snappy band, dressed all in white, taps out the beat. Welcome to Club Olympus, enter Zeus, and enter Maya.

For those of you who didn't spend their 17th year in Mr Newson's A-level crash course in Classical Civilisation, Zeus is king of the gods; one day he seduces shy, retiring Maya (Lucy Garrioch). Soon Maya bears a son she names Hermes, and retreats to her cave to bring him up, away from the wrath of Zeus' wife, Hera. Hermes (Nick Ingram), however, an infant prodigy if ever there was one, isn't content with living unrecognised, a mere junior god in a cave, and sets out to make mischief, and win his place amongst the gods: which, of course, he does, in spectacular style.

There are so many moments in Hermes when you suck in your breath prepared for a bum note, only to trip on a slash of tempo. When Hermes himself comes on stage, with exaggerated stage expressions, and waggling fingers, you think; 'Its going duff, its going duff.' But a burst of soul, a flash of humour, flushes the doubt from you and, transfixed, you're wondering how on earth this strange mass is working. The set, which occasionally looks as if it has been forged from cardboard boxes and poster paint, is dwarfed by the magnificent costumes. Hera, in all her bustling rage, is resplendent in peacock feathers, her coat made of gold stripes and black tiger flashes. The horror of Maya's labour, all screaming and a pillow squeezed beneath an apron, ends in a comic birth in which Hermes grown head protrudes from a crude, cloth-baby body. It shouldn't work, it shouldn't work… and yet… and yet...

The actors are pretty much excellent to a man. Hecate, the showgirl, played by Laura Darkins, seems a bit of an extraneous add-on, but the rest of the cast each demonstrate a peculiar flair. Lucy Garrioch's voice is show stopping, Nick Ingram's energy nothing short of breathtaking; a tender monologue to his cows by Gavin James as Apollo provides brilliant comedy, and Elizabeth Rowden (Hera) is surely, surely destined for great things. Her versatility as a character actress as amply displayed in playing the goddess-virago as a swaying, Devon peasant.

But the true marvel is the script itself. Never has rhymed verse seemed so natural or seemed so clever. The aplomb with which poet Jehane Markham matches words - teeming hep-cat slang and four syllable trills - is so easy, that it is only halfway through that I realised it was in verse. The script is, in short, a delight. And jazz pianist Pete Letanka's tunes constantly surprise; one second they're a little hammy, the next they're a slice of tenderness, the next they're being belted out like gospel as only Aretha could belt out; the slick harmonies, the slips from genre to genre, the ensemble pieces, and the heavy twang of the band blasts the whole together. And you're longing to shake your way down the aisles and clap to the Lord and sing 'Hallelujah!'

Till 29 October 2006