Review

Culture

Friendship

Theatre

7 May 2023

4 min read

Guys and Dolls' celebration of commitment

A truly joyous production of Guys and Dolls causes Oliver Wright to reflect on the positive portrayal of commitment and oath-making that underpins the show’s high-stakes rolling.

Oliver Wright

After 15 years as a lawyer in London, Oliver is currently doing a DPhil at the University of Oxford.

Five actors stand dressed in 50s clothing.

The leading characters.

Bridge Theatre.

Guys and Dolls is the quintessential musical, and it’s playing gloriously at the Bridge Theatre in London right now. As I left the theatre the other day, I found myself on the ticket website wondering about gambling on an immediate return visit. Are shows ever as good second time round, though? Can such a repeat ever bring new life? Or do repetitions fall flat, guilty of aesthetic anaesthetising?

These worries reminded me of Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Constantin Constantius, and his somewhat bewildering psychological venture Repetition (1843). In one scene, Constantius retraces his steps to a theatre where he remembers attending a farce that had him in raptures. The second time, however: not so much.

“I endured it for half an hour”,

Constantius reports,

“and then left the theatre, thinking: There is no repetition at all. This made a deep impression on me.”

But the psychological experiment does not end there. The clue is in his name – Constantin Constantius: constancy doubled, repeated. Repetition can bring new life, all things can be made new (as he implies), if repetition is coupled with constancy, with commitment. That commitment drives repetition forward, not back. “Repetition and recollection”, he claims, “are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backwards, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forwards.”

What has all this to do with Guys and Dolls in London 2023? At one level, the show is a wonderful evocation of street-life in mid-Manhattan, of smart but skittish low-level criminality – the pulsating rush for the next illicit game of dice, betting on the horses, falling in and out with Dolls, and generally trying to evade the police. You sometimes think it’s the gamblers and the gambling which steals a Guys and Dolls show.

But the way this one plays at the Bridge Theatre, I was struck by such joy and exuberance and laughter, intermingled with a celebration of commitment. What does commitment have to do with gambling; what has commitment to do with joy?

One of the leads, Sky Masterson, is my way in. We meet him first as something of a cad, flying around, emptying fellow gamblers’ pockets, carousing in Havana, returning for another round of Craps. But he nevertheless turns out to be a man of his word; he literally belongs to his promise. With a flourish early on, he hands over a fateful piece of paper: his marker, an ‘I owe you’ note. It is a guarantee.

The beneficiary is the evangelising Sarah Brown from the Soul-Mission, who Sky at this stage is wooing merely to win yet another bet. The marker is not as frivolous as his affections appear to be. This IOU has a power to which Sky willingly binds himself. Its force, Sky says, can be attested by anyone else in town. Markers will appear again much later in the drama in the chaotic scenes which lead to Sky’s reappearance, as he desperately tries to discharge his obligation, and the magnificent Luck be a Lady Tonight, itself an appeal for ‘luck’ to prove constant, not to be ‘fly-by-night’. So there is an eager commitment – when it comes to gambling – to be ‘good for the money’, to be ‘a man of my word’.

Marriage, like any relationship, involves gamble and commitment. The greater the proposed commitment, the greater the gamble. The greater the gamble up front, the greater will be the commitment required. If it wasn’t a gamble, it wouldn’t require commitment.

But the production shows another comingling of gambling and commitment: in relationships. It falls to the principal women, Sarah and Miss Adelaide, rather farcically propping up a bar, to expose this (‘Marry the man today’). Marriage, like any relationship, involves gamble and commitment. The greater the proposed commitment, the greater the gamble. The greater the gamble up front, the greater will be the commitment required. If it wasn’t a gamble, it wouldn’t require commitment. ‘Give him your hand today / And save the fist for after’!

But commitment in the show is not portrayed as the ‘grit your teeth’, or ‘turn the other cheek’ kind of commitment. No – commitment brings joy and new life to the drama. Without Sky’s IOU, there’s no Guys and Dolls. Without Sarah and Adelaide’s search for commitment, there’s only abuse. And this feeling of joy is widespread. The commitments being made are not just those ‘on stage’, but also by the audience. As you will read in the show’s reviews, the audience are implicated in the action. They are ‘immersed’, standing alongside the actors who move and dance and sing their way through them. The audience are ‘in’ the Hot Box strip-joint, sat at tables. They are gambling along with the crap-shooters. They are witnesses to the testifying in the Save-A-Soul Mission (played in this production as a high point of the show, with ‘impromptu’ encores for Nicely Nicely’s testimony ‘Sit down, you’re rockin’ the boat’). Indeed, they are not just witnesses, but participants.

That is our commitment, too. Without costume, we nevertheless agree to shed our ‘outside’ lives to participate, to be bound by the terms of the drama. And this ‘shedding’, this agreeing to be bound, this cost which we willingly take on ourselves, ignites joy. Commitment is not a stolid virtue. We need not shirk self-imposed restrictions in principle as being joy-less. There is always a gamble in relationship. And relationship’s gamble only ever pays off through commitment. Commitment to the other.

Commitment, like Kierkegaard’s ‘repetition’, can forge new life. As well as negatively portraying the ‘falling flat’ of aesthetic repetition, Kierkegaard also celebrates a repetition which is both more mundane and lifegiving. It is life recollected forwards. He writes: “Hope is a lovely maiden who slips away between one's fingers; recollection is a beautiful old woman with whom one is never satisfied at the moment; repetition is a beloved wife of whom one never wearies, for one becomes weary only of what is novel.”

Reader, I bought more tickets.

Review

Awe and wonder

Culture

Theatre

22 April 2025

5 min read

This Narnia play left me yearning to cheer on good

The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe is still relevant at 75.

Steve Dew-Jones

Steve is news director of Article 18, a human rights organisation documenting Christian persecution in Iran.

A play set shows a witch and lion on stage.

EMG Entertainment.

This article contains spoilers.

It’s been 75 years since C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe was first published, and the story is still captivating audiences and even sparking fresh controversy.

If you hadn’t heard the news, the role of the lion, Aslan, is rumoured to have been offered to Meryl Streep, a woman, for Greta Gerwig’s upcoming film, set to be released in time for Thanksgiving next year.

I recently saw another adaption of the famous book - Adam Peck’s play - in a theatre in Torquay, as part of a 75th anniversary tour of the UK.

And having previously read the book and watched two different film versions, I still found myself considering elements of the story I hadn’t previously, hidden depths I hadn’t noticed - even if these didn’t include Aslan’s gender.

For those not familiar with the tale, it follows the journey of four children through the doors of a magic wardrobe, which transports them into a fantastical kingdom in which a lion reigns but a witch has held dominion for 100 years.

Under the White Witch’s spell, there has been only winter for a century - “always winter and never Christmas”, as one famous line from the story goes.

But now, thrust into this story in the fulfilment of a prophecy long foretold, four “sons of Adam and daughters of Eve” - boys and girls, to you and me - come as the lion king returns, and a new day dawns.

The winter begins to thaw, Spring is in the air, and Father Christmas even shows up to shower the children with gifts.

But the return of Aslan - and even Santa Claus - doesn’t signal the end of the story. There is still a battle to be fought; the witch still has power and even ensnares one of the children, Edmund, with the promise of all the Turkish delight he could wish for, and the title of a prince.

It is at this moment - still early in the tale - that the battle between good and evil is clearly laid out, and the forces of light and darkness clash thenceforth.

In the play, those enslaved by the witch are clad in black to emphasise the distinction, while much is made of the meaning of the name of the youngest child, Lucy: “bringer of light”.

The imagery is abundantly clear, as it has ever been in Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, of which the The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe is the first and most famous of seven books.

And the author, renowned for being an atheist who later became a Christian, leans heavily upon his newfound faith throughout the Narnian tales, and not least in the character of Aslan.

Yet while you and I may frustratingly regularly let ourselves down, there is also something within us - is there not? - that ever yearns to cheer on the forces of good.

At Easter, it is especially hard not to see in Aslan’s death and resurrection a striking similarity with the figure at the centre of the Christian faith.

Indeed, it was this moment of greatest sacrifice - for the “traitor”, Edmund - that most struck me this time around, even though I already knew the story so well.

At church the following day, as I took Communion, I was still reflecting on Aslan’s sacrifice and wondering whether Edmund more closely resembles the average Christian - myself included - than the older, nobler brother, Peter, in whom most of us would prefer to see our likeness.

My mind returned to a moment in the theatre that had humbled me, when the lady sitting in front of us handed me £20 to treat my children for being “so good”, having at the interval made me bristle by asking them to sit quietly and stop kicking her chair.

“Fair enough?” I hear you suggest. Well, perhaps, but I didn’t think it until that humbling moment after the curtain had closed.

My son later told me he hadn’t thought the lady had been unkind, which again got me thinking about my own imperfections and need to be more childlike.

Yet while you and I may frustratingly regularly let ourselves down, there is also something within us - is there not? - that ever yearns to cheer on the forces of good.

I doubt many audience members were rooting for the witch, while I suspect most can also understand the need to “beware the witch”, as one song from the play puts it

Another biblical parallel is the fulfilment of a prophecy long foretold, while both the Bible and The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe highlight the special significance of someone innocent dying to save the guilty.

There is even a clear reference at the very start of the book and play to one of Lewis’ most famous pieces of theology, when the professor in whose wardrobe the children later get lost asks them a question as they consider whether or not to believe Lucy about the magical kingdom that she first glimpsed.

She’s either lying, mad or telling the truth, the professor says, in much the same way that Lewis says of Jesus Christ’s own central claim: he’s either “mad, bad or God”.

As for the success of the play, as someone who no longer lives in London, I was certainly impressed by this West End product.

The scene changes are creative, aided by music, dance and possibly even a trapdoor - my children and I had different opinions on how the magical disappearances of certain characters were achieved. Maybe it truly was magic.

There’s also the nice touch of the play starting even before it officially begins, through the twinkling of a soldier’s fingers upon the keys of a piano while the audience take their seats - perhaps to help us turn our minds from a sunny day in the English Riviera to dreary London at the time of the Blitz.

So, do go and see the play if you get the opportunity - it’ll do you good and make you think, whether or not you choose to consider if the lion is male or female.