The Happy Prince

I caught the matinee of this. A mixed bag for me, as it attempts to turn an elemental and simple tale of goodness into a traditional tale of heroes and villains.

Some spoilers follow. . .

A year ago I caught Guy Chambers' musical of "The Selfish Giant," another story from Oscar Wilde's volume of children's stories. Chambers gave into the text, and created a simple elemental tale of a giant's selfishness turning to goodness over the seasons of a year. It was exquisitely overwhelmingly beautiful, not at all conventional, and would be a hard sell to commercial audiences seeking individualistic heroism in a battle with diabolical villainy, like a Disney story.

This version of "The Happy Prince" tries to be both elementally faithful to it's source (it has gorgeous choreographed and scored ballet scenes depicting the dance/flight of a good-natured swallow) and also a Disney Story (it makes up a framing device of an evil factory boss, Janie Dee, and her evil henchman, Phil Daniels, torturing their workers, one of whom them fantasizes becoming the swallow of Wilde's story).

But the rendering here is neither fish nor fowl. Daniels is a marvelously mannered and funny villain as the cackling factory boss, but he and the Swallow are never really part of the same story.

Should the makers have wished to fully gussy up and Disney up this story, their major mistake was not realising that the Happy Prince himself, not the Swallow, would be the protagonist in a Disney show, and Wilde's story the denouement to his story. For in Wilde's story the Prince is already a reformed character, and the Swallow already a wonderful creature: and the two simply meet and appreciate the wonder of each other.

But in a Disney story, we'd go back in time to follow the individualistic hedonistic life of the Prince before he became a statue. We'd enjoy that roller-coaster existence, after which he'd become a statue and free himself from his selfishness by coming to the aid of the Swallow/Factory worker, whereupon she'd kiss the stautue and he's be her Prince forever after. This sort of story and Wilde's story both have their appeal for different audiences, both could work, but what we have here are exquisite glimpses of both types of story, both entertaining in their way, one all Phil Daniels funny antics, the other all graceful giving ballet dancing Swallow, but the two stories never really coalescing into a coherent whole.

But the ballet is beautiful, Daniels is funny, the tunes that combine voices are particularly moving, so 3 and a half stars from me.