Tete a Tete’s Salad Days, now playing at the Riverside Studios for an absurdly short space of time, has what musicals supposedly have, but so rarely do – a joyousness and zest that left the entire audience exhilarated. Obviously part of the credit for this goes to the composer Julian Slade and lyricist Dorothy Reynolds, but a lot goes to the director and cast of this current production by the opera company Tete a Tete.
      Since its first enormously successful production in 1954, there have been various revivals of Salad Days, but they have often made the mistake of trying to update the musical, or to satirise it. Monty Python’s spoof in 1972 was merely an extreme form of the bitter over-reaction to Salad Days which led to savage caricaturing of its uppercrust protagonists and their safe world. But Bill Bankes-Jones, the director of this production, has made the sensible decision to treat it as a period piece, and to let not only the snobbery and class-segregation of the era speak for themselves without any unnecessary underlining, but also its rather enviable cosiness.
      Timothy, brilliantly played by Sam Harrison, has all the gaucherie and repression that could be expected from an upperclass young man in the fifties, but it is somehow endearing; and during the evening the poker is gradually withdrawn from his bottom and he falls in love, suffers from jealousy and dances wildly. (There is a wonderful moment when he comes on-stage, pushing the mobile piano, full of rage and jealousy that could so easily have been exaggerated and facetious but that in Harrison’s hands is subtle, moving and funny.) Jane (Michelle Francis) was also excellent – full of vitality and passion, with an enchantingly pure singing-voice. But the really unusual and remarkable thing about this production was that the entire cast could sing so superbly and were so skilled, exuberant and authentic in all the range of characters they played. As my fellow-viewer kept saying: how extraordinary to have an opera company whose members could sing and act and dance so brilliantly.
      It was silly, if understandable, that the reaction to Salad Days in the sixties and seventies, should have been contempt and caricature, for in fact (as was conveyed by this glorious production) that musical heralded the rebellion against tradition that those decades themselves embodied; even if, in Salad Days, it was rebellion with the parents still safely in the next room. The magic piano forced people to break out of their class-bound rules and rigmaroles, and dance – the dancing was literally and metaphorically a loosening up and bursting free.
      Tete a Tete’s production of Salad Days is the best production of a musical I have ever seen, and my only criticism is baffled fury that it cannot play longer at the Riverside, and is not going to be put on in the West End. I don’t apologise for what may sound like hyperbole – it is what truthfully needs to be said, as well the fact that I have been humming Salad Days’ tunes ever since seeing it, and dancing to them too.
Jane O'Grady