Johnny The Priest - Part 6

A VIEW FROM THE GODS - Icarus looks down on Johnny the Priest

Thank heavens for the original cast recording of Johnny the Priest, for without it there would be no way back to rediscovery. Thank heavens that Decca had the sense to record it. A black mark to Decca for then pulling its issue when the show collapsed. Thank heavens that That's Entertainment dug the recording up after a quarter of a century and (if only in a limited edition) published the recording in 1983. Does Johnny the Priest live up to the expectation of 'a musical drama'? It is a challenging description. Surely the critics couldn't all have been wrong in their reserved judgements? Why should we give it a second thought?

 

Johnny (Bunny May) lifted above by the RADA-trained youth of Maybury

This is that most difficult of things - the serious musical. In its way it was at once a brave and modest show. At first sight, it seems to have limited horizons, a flimsy little piece about a well-meaning vicar who wants to do good to others but can't tell the lie that will take one of his reformed protégés back to the straight and narrow, and a boy trying to get a grip on life. Of action there is none. And it's not as if we are dealing with weighty conflicts: this doesn't have the emotional dimension of a musical based on Romeo and Juliet. It isn't a costume piece about Robert Browning and Elizabeth Moulton-Barrett. There are no set-pieces or songs that press themselves on the consciousness. This is a contemporary subject where the quandary is eminently old-fashioned. It's about goodness, never particularly fashionable. It tries to put the lives of the questioning young on stage, and it is hip and relentlessly modern. The lyric, when Johnny's girlfriend Vi confesses her feelings for him, tells us so.

I'm your girl
No other darling but me
I'm the most on your Christy-mus tree
You're my fella
Weeeeeee!

But it's flippy to be
On the move
In the groove
Oh I'll prove
Yes I'll prove
That I'm your own dear girl

 

 

In the coldness of print, the words are terrible, mawkish, a list of expressions that might more judiciously have been left in the waste-paper basket. But they are artful in their naiveté. Even Salad Days didn't get as artless as this, and here we are supposedly dealing with the rough and tumble youth of London's dockland. But there is something achieved, a straining towards adulthood (captured beautifully in the performances of Bunny May and Frances Buckeridge) that Peter Powell and Antony Hopkins have recognised. This song, 'I'm Your Girl' is greatly helped, as is so much of the score, by the orchestration, which was done (most unusually) by the composer, and Gordon Langford. They must have divided up the songs between them. Hopkins surely orchestrated the 'religioso' elements of the score, the numbers that remain chamber pieces, while Langford surely wrote the big-band arrangements that frequently lift Johnny the Priest into another sphere.

The ensemble (all having named parts) is made up entirely of 'adolescent' youngsters. This Greek chorus, presenting the challenge to the Vicar's crusade of reform, has no adults in it. It is a brilliant, if inevitable, achievement of the librettist, making this the closest British musicals ever came to West Side Story's display of modern youth. The adolescents are what the authors (or the Players Theatre management) consider to be up-to-date. They slouch through the songs. They berate the playing of ping-pong in the church hall as a social distraction, and have a healthy suspicion of organised religion - and who can say that, by the time the curtain falls, they have not been proved right?

IMPASSIONED VISION

In the circumstances, it's not surprising that the matter of faith and belief throws itself across the play. And, in 1960, only fifteen years after the end of the war, when teenagers were being recognised as something more than people who had yet to grow up, there was a relevance in it. Many of the numbers have 'faith' at their core. There is 'Vicarage Tea', an intriguingly shaped trio in which the new young vicar and his wife nervously entertain Miss Fortescue, a member of the church council. In 'Be Not Afraid' (note the biblical arrangement of the title) the vicar and his wife support each other's ambition. Mary Highfield has an impassioned vision of a better life for the troubled Johnny in 'Beyond These Narrow Streets', and how tellingly Hopkins makes his melody soar when necessary. Johnny realises there is something else he can't reach beyond the 'Rooftops', and finally there is Highfield's recognition of 'A Boy Called Johnny'. In all of these, Hopkins's music is more than hymnal, and there are moments of beauty, notably in the melos and brief lyric of Johnny's 'Rooftops'. This is great musical theatre stuff. The music aches with feeling.

If we are comparing Johnny the Priest to West Side Story - and the comparison has been made - where is the depth of emotion in the British effort? It seems concentrated in what is going on in the vicar's mind. The tussle between good and what the vicar perceives as evil is the central dilemma, and the public has never got worked up about what goes on in vicar's minds. The love interest skips the vicar and his wife (perhaps an area the writers should have explored, extending the play's brief) and concentrates on Johnny and Vi, a role in which Frances Buckeridge's performance was almost wholly ignored at the time. Their two duets, 'I'm Your Girl' and 'A Tanner's Worth of Tune', a jumpy, playful little song in which Johnny and Vi can't agree about the décor of a coffee bar. The song should be taken up by a wallpaper firm's advertising department, for - with its description of wallpaper patterns with bottles, bangers on forks, fishes and bottles - it reeks of its time, and the melody is too insistent to forget. How brilliantly, too, the song reinforces the strength of feeling between Johnny and Vi. It is an argument set to music, but the argument couldn't be happier. It's almost a masterstroke.

There is always Hope Jackman on hand as the earthy Mrs Palmer, and she is a much-needed antidote to the holy musings back at the vicarage, notably in her abrasive opinion of the charitable work of the church in 'The Little Box', with her advice to the vicar

The money that's inside it
Well, you'd better go and hide it
Or the teddy boys'll nick it, that's for sure!

To more exotic rhythms, Mrs Palmer has more greedy advice for the young in 'Johnny Earn Peanuts', but Mrs Palmer sees things in black and white. Elsewhere, Johnny the priest tends to the grey. When, towards the end of the play, Richard and Mary Highfield with Johnny meet Miss Fortescue in the street, we have 'Stormy Night', another conversation put to music (just as Hopkins does in 'Vicarage Tea') with consummate skill. The discomfort of the situation is splendidly conveyed by the hesitant setting, and the wind whistles. The final moments of the show are decidedly chilly, and 'Stormy Night' accentuates the brooding darkness at the heart of Johnny the Priest, which some might mistake for dullness.

TOO MUCH BRYLCREEM

To enliven things there is always the ensemble, who work hard only at being what actors mistakenly think of as adolescents. The teddy-boys' girlfriends bawl about being expected to satisfy their needs by playing 'Ping-Pong' and moan their jive-like devotion to 'Doin' the Burp', but there is always the feeling that not one of the actresses would dream of going on stage without a nice string of pearls at her throat. When the young invade Johnny the Priest it is as if the twin-set brigade has met the seat-slashers. The boys in West Side Story had flick knives; in Johnny the Priest they just wore rather too much Brylcreem.

The several songs for the teenagers of Maybury jolly the show along, but they don't alter the mood of Johnny the Priest. It's often bleak. The days are dark in Maybury. The light doesn't get about too much. Reginald Woolley's sets favour dark corners, angles and doorways and backcloths that need cheering up. It seems no mistake that the show's sheet music cover is predominantly brown, and the programme cover the most deep of reds. The great blocks of colour, a quality somehow missing from much of the show itself, accentuate the show's intentional beauty. And of beauty there is a good deal here.

I suspect that Johnny the Priest may be a real work of art. Perhaps, though, goodness - and the triumph of goodness, at least when it means dropping a helpless kid like Johnny in the dirt - is not as potent as some vicars might have us believe. If Richard Highfield had told that helpful lie, we could have watched Johnny walk off into the hope of a new life, with - as Mary Highfield puts it - 'telescope to eye'.

Icarus

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