If a young man called Julian Slade, then resident composer at Bristol Old Vic, hadn’t rattled out an end-of-season show for his company in the summer of 1954, maybe Britain wouldn’t have had the eminent producer who brought us Cats, Les Mis, Miss Saigon and many other musicals. Come to that, The Times might not have its current theatre critic and, of course, you wouldn’t be reading an article about Salad Days.
Yes, that’s the ditzy, delightful show whose 50th birthday Cameron Mackintosh celebrates tomorrow. Down in Bristol, he’s bringing together Alex Jennings, Joanna Riding, Anthony Andrews and others to deliver songs from that and other Slade musicals, raise money for the Old Vic Theatre School and, not least, give the 74-year-old tunesmith a terrific evening out.
“It was being taken to see Salad Days on my eighth birthday that can be blamed for my subsequent career,” says Mackintosh. In fact, he’d already seen it at the Vaudeville, the London theatre to which it had transferred in August, and liked it so much that he’d asked to go back a second time as an extra special treat: “I was enthralled, enchanted. I loved the idea of something magical and musical taking over people’s lives and I was fascinated by the practical side of making that magic.”
That magic and music came mainly from a honky-tonk called Minnie which Jane and Timothy and later their chums Nigel and Fiona — oh, those 1950s names — borrow from a mysterious tramp and use to make policemen, bishops and everyone else in Hyde Park launch into St Vitus mode and mad-dervish merriment. Hence maybe the liveliest of the show’s many irresistible hums: “Oh, look at me, I’m dancing.”
Well, if songs like that helped to determine the tot Mackintosh’s choice of career, they also sent this boy dancing down the Strand to Charing Cross station. I like to pretend that it was seeing Richard Burton’s Hamlet, John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and other solemn stuff that got me writing about the theatre, but, if I’m honest, it was just as much the show that the more severe critics dismissed as frippery — but couldn’t stop from running for five and a half years, then a record for a musical.
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It’s easy to patronise a show that begins in a Cambridge where, according to the opening songs, dons eat oysters in the cloisters and young swells walk by the river in spring. Newly graduated Timothy vaguely hopes to cadge a job from an influential uncle, and newly graduated Jane expects to end her deb season by marrying “Viscount A, gay Lord B or the Honourable Mr C”. Actually she secretly weds Tim and, after being offered £7 a week to look after Minnie, they subcontract much of the work to a mute prole called Troppo. He scampers about collecting pennies for £2 7s 6d, which he dumbly signals to be over-generous. Imagine what Osborne’s Jimmy Porter, graduate of a “white-tile university” and scourge of the upper-crust, would have made of that.
Again, you can’t help noticing the mania for repetition shared by Slade and his co-lyricist, Dorothy Reynolds. Jane enjoys sitting in the sun, the sun, the sun, not to mention the sun, and the cast spends a lot of time looking, looking, look, look, look, looking for a piano, yes a piano, a P.I.A.N.O. Yet Richard Eyre can recite every lyric in Salad Days, and so, very nearly, can I, down to the loony lines sung by Tim’s boffin uncle when he arrives by spacecraft: “You never saw a saucer so saucy as mine, you never saw a saucer that’s even half as fine.”
Actually, some of the lyrics, like the tunes, seem pretty good when you hear them today. Given half a chance, I will sing you Jane and Tim’s farewell to Cambridge: “If I start looking behind me and begin retracing my track, I’ll remind you to remind me, we said we wouldn’t look back.”
And would Cole Porter have turned up his nose at the lyrics in which a cabaret singer called Cleopatra sings of that lady’s refusal to marry her brother: “I won’t ptolerate Ptolemy to collar me”?
Oh well, maybe the show is an example of the naff escapism (“a glibly codified fairytale world of no more use to the student of life than a doll’s house to a student of town planning”) that, back in 1954, Kenneth Tynan was driving from the stage. But go out and smell London today. Try not to get knocked over by a motorbike courier.
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Don’t you too feel a little nostalgia for the 1950s, even in Slade’s revisionist, idealised form? “We’re young, we’re as green as the leaf on the tree, for these are our salad days,” sings Jane in a title-song to bring tears to the eyes of buffers and cynics alike. Tomorrow, let’s join Sir Cameron in toasting the jaunty utopianism of Julian Slade.
Bristol Old Vic: 0117-987 7877