If You Kiss Me, Kiss Me - Young Vic

[Marwood]

OK,so this link: Blouinartinfo says it's not a musical but this seems a more apt place to post this in than Plays or Opera & Dance so there you go.It starts later this week, anyone else going to see it? (I'm going first weekend in April) - an interesting choice of songs, I knew Joy Division and the Human League were going to get covered, but thankfully they've steered clear of the likes of Love Will Tear Us Apart and Don't You Want Me, so hopefully it won't end up like a late 70s/early 80s Star In Their Eyes night out.

[n1david]

I am scheduled to go next week.

[dgjbear]

I'm going on March 19th - not sure I fancied it but a friend bought me a ticket for Christmas. Website says its more of a concert with dance than a musical. It also says it lasts just an hour. All the way from s wales to London for an hour. Must choose my friends more carefully...

[n1david]

I am sorry to say that I did not connect with this very much at all.

It's all a bit weird, Horrocks does very declamatory performances while dancers do things around her. I'm not generally a fan of modern dance and this didn't change my perspective. There's what you might call a prologue and an epilogue but it didn't really add up to very much for me. But some of the songs worked at a very superficial level. It's very loud. We were in row D and it was rock concert levels.

It's 55 minutes long. There were people who left during the show, and people who cheered at the end. Will be very interested to see what others think of this.

I'd love to be more coherent about this but it just doesn't feel like a fully-formed piece of work.

[Boob]

Has Aletta Collins got a new agent or something? She seems to be having a bit of a... "return".

[QueerTheatre]

This is easily the best thing i've seen all year, such a beautiful production. Its basically a punk rock cabaret, incredible movement and great music (totally unknown to me before the show i hate to admit)

The audience were so engaged from start to finish.

[Nicholas]

Cunnilingus, cheerlessness and conservatism – this really is one hell of a show. It’s not my kind of music – I must confess I find The Smiths the most insufferable band – yet here, belted out by Horrocks with passion and fury and set in a context that gives them such meaning, the songs had a political as well as a musical prescience. Horrocks, naturally, is a tremendous singer whose love for the songs is clear in every passionate performance, but this is far far more than merely a gig of her greatest hits. It’s a cleverly constructed, politically important Janus of a show, looking back to look forwards and making a striking political point amid the rocking concert setting.

In some ways, Horrocks herself is not the focus – she has a brief spiel at beginning and end, and other than that sings songs to which the dancers perform. The plots instead focus on our four dancer protagonists – extremes of 80s lifestyles opaquely told through wonderful dance to apathetic lyrics. As Horrocks belts out The Human League’s ‘Empire State Human’, one man pumps weights incessantly, as a reminder of the macho man action movies suggested. Dancing the Macarena to Joy Division’s ‘Isolation’, the central oxymoron of the 80s club scene – that people dance alone to be together – is literalised very wittily. A Morrissey song is sung, before which the man and the woman rolled together into the one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation, as Horrocks sings “I just want a lover like any other/I’m in distress, I need a caress” – casual sex is a matter of course, as opposed to something meaningful, the moves and many positions far from Morrissey’s florid bad sex (“the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it whacked and smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone”) but as mechanical as the Macarena. One man first tentatively, then comfortably fumbles about with another man, the politics of Stonewall somewhere distant in the background as human feelings come first here. The miserable repetition of domestic life – in and out comes the fridge, school is tedium, work is tedium and home life is tedium – is a montage that works, given the miserable tone of most northern love songs. If this is an exercise in archaeology, what these various tableaus tend to do is recreate the youthful mood of the 80s; as a 90s band would later sing, our protagonists dance and drink and screw because there’s nothing else to do, and just as Planer, Ryan, Edmonson and the late great Mayall, they live in surreal situ together. As a recreation it’s on the button. But there is much more to this than merely being an exercise in archaeology. These are love songs, and the stories are nominally those of love (comfy home life, casual sex and youthful explorations), but these northern songs are steeped in the politics of the time, and it is here that the production pushes itself into something really quite remarkable.

Over the action presides the wonderful Jane Horrocks like the ghost of Conservatism yet to come. She casts a wry eye over proceedings, performing the songs with a slyness in her voice as if to warn the 80s characters of how little would change in 30 years. This is most clear when the 5’2 Horrocks belts out “Tall, tall, tall, I wanna be tall, tall, tall” with a knowing, self-mocking irony, but this knowingness goes through all the songs, with a far more political and far more pointed edge. Her brief archaeology-invoking introduction locates her (and us) in the present, and the pointed date she later states – 1978 – is, of course, the year before Thatcher’s election, setting the political scene. As such these are more than domestic love songs – they are retrospective political statements about Thatcher’s turbulent decade. The dissatisfaction and apathy the songs had then is clear through performance, but in setting the scene today looking back to yesterday, that apathy is given context and consequence – apathy then changed nothing, only encouraged apathy now. Scenes of work and school – clichés in movies (think Gregory’s Girl or Ken Loach) are set to songs about being alone and danced with dissatisfaction. ‘My New House’ – sung with an ever-increasing sarcasm in Horrocks’ voice over projections of overlapping and overlapping and overlapping house blueprints and similarly overlapping scenes of matter-of-fact f***ing – becomes, in one fell swoop, a parody of the Young Ones’ communal house and a barbed attack on Thatcher’s changes in social housing, which can only remind us of the headlines we read about the housing crisis today. Most affecting is the absence of the gay character – before this song, seen bloodied as if beaten, left alone by his friends and clearly shaken and unwell – who leaves the stage bare to let Horrocks sing ‘I Know It’s Over’; as Horrocks’ shaky voice on an empty stage begins “Oh mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head”, this song about mortality, being alone and the consequences of love gains a distressing poignancy it never had before, the AIDS crisis told not through major statistics and medical knowledge but that heartbreaking human loneliness that still means for loneliness today. At the end, Horrocks brings us to the present with ‘Life is a Pigsty’, Morrissey’s message of misery showing how little has changed, both in politics and apathetic attitudes towards. The relationship between the songs, the performances and the context makes this a profoundly political work, about the reasons there were to be apathetic in the 80s, the desperation for love, and the consequences of apathy today; this is not just a recreation of but a judgement of the 80s and a study of its legacy.

But amidst this apathetic reappraisal of already apathetic songs, there’s something more – something truly touching, truly personal, truly affecting about the way Horrocks structures this all, the plot it tells and the underlying message about love amidst politics, with a pulse as pounding in its romantic heart as in its punky spunky baselines. As Horrocks parades through the stage, she allows herself the odd lusty look at male beauty, the odd dance, the odd moment of interconnectivity. Her final musical choice might, in its chorus, hammer home the grimness the songs also explore – ‘Life Is A Pigsty’ – but its final words of “Even now, in the final hour of my life, I’m falling in love, again” are lines of hope against hopelessness and, cliché though it may be, love conquering all. If You Kiss Me Kiss Me may primarily be a rocking, passionate and wry look at how little political apathy and youthful optimism did then to negate the former and encourage the latter, but above all, as Larkin used carved rock to prove, Horrocks uses Northern Rock to prove our almost instinct almost true: what will survive of us is love.

So, perhaps I’m still high on Joey’s leftover horse tranquilisers from the New London Theatre the adrenaline of seeing Stephen Sondheim, and a part of me thinks I’m talking out of my bottom and probably reading too much into something that’s just meant to be a gig (great gig), but in direct contrast to n1david, surprising no-one more than myself, and for only the second time this year (the first being The Encounter), it’s a full five stars.

[n1david]

Definitely a marmite show! I do wish I had got out of it what Nicholas (in another superb piece of writing) and theodorebass did; seems to be falling mostly in the middle with 3* from The Arts Desk and The Stage and 4* from the Telegraph. Interesting that theodorebass referred to the audience being so engaged - there were at least 4 walkouts on Tuesday when I was there. I'm glad others are loving this; as I said the dance elements did virtually nothing for me and I accept that's a blind spot I have - must try harder!

(Although in looking through the reviews this morning, I'm not alone - postcardsgods.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/if-you-kiss-me-kiss-me-young-vic-london.html )

[QueerTheatre]

I read that review earlier! Hilarious!

The night i went (Monday) there was a young child in the audience, he must have been 4 or 5 at the oldest, and after about 5 minutes, he started mimicking the choreography, playing air guitar and drums, and clapping along - it was amazing to see an audience not reprimand his enjoyment, but actively encourage it. The adults around him started joining in, and by the end of the show not one audience member could say this little boy hadn't improved the entire experience. People were shouting out encouragement to the bang, and it was an incredible atmosphere - it didn't feel like we were at the young vic, but more like a music festival or a gig - not just because of the music, but the audience were aware of each others enjoyment and consciously encouraging the experience as a collective rather than a group of individuals.

Interesting that the piece may not work without that little boy in the audience!

[Phantom of London]

I saw this, this afternoon and afraid I full fully into David's camp on this one.

This is where love and hate collide here, you feel cheated that this musical was only 55 minutes long, but then after 15 minutes it become insufferable.

Several walk outs.

1 star.

[patterdalepip]

I was there Saturday afternoon and also saw several walk outs. It seems to be a bit of an ego trip for Ms Horrocks and is only saved by the skillful dancers and the talented musicians

[Deleted]

I fear I join the walk out club. I hate walking out mid-show, but there was no other opportunity to escape!!

[Marwood]

Saw this tonight and liked it a lot - I don't think it had much to say beyond Horrocks spiel about love songs which book-ended proceedings, but it was light, frothy and above all fun,a refreshing change to see musical theatre that has music that isn't bogged down with either corny show tunes or the same old likes of Sinatra or Frankie Valli. I think an hour of this was probably enough, not sure why you'd walk out unless you realised after 10 minutes you'd left the kids at home by themselves, the advertising was pretty up-front about the sort of music that would be played, if you thought this was going to be Little Voice when you booked then you've got no one to blame but yourself.

[liverpool54321]

Caught the penultimate show today. Loved it. Only knew 4 songs but great interpretation and contemporary dance. I'd love to see a longer show in a bigger concert venue as a one off. Full house as have been most shows from what I hear. No one left early - guess people finally heard about what to expect.

[liverpool54321]

Apr 19, 2016 10:28:37 GMT @theatremonkey said:

Apr 16, 2016 15:22:56 GMT liverpool54321 said:

Only knew 4 songs

From what I've read and heard, that may be a record...

That's what comes from having a housemate in the early 80s who was a massive Joy Divison and Smiths fan. Still , four songs more than I could probably name by Sondheim!