Radio 4 2001 Closer to Heaven

Here's the transcript from the Saturday Intervew programme on Radio 4. The Interviews are Tom Sutcliffe, Philip Henshaw and Ann Robbins.

TS - In interviews, Jonathan Harvey, the author of the book here, and of Beautiful Thing, has said that the inspiration for the show was The Sound of Music. I think Rogers and Hammerstein might have been startled by the results though, since Closer to Heaven is not exactly what comes to mind when you think of family entertainment. It is not a shy piece. Indeed, during the first act I was reminded several times of that classic scene from the Mel Brooks film The Producers in which the camera pans along a line of astounded faces in the audience. The camp excess is entirely intentional though because Closer to heaven is set in a gay nightclub and concerns a love triangle between Shel, the daughter of the club's gay owner, Straight Dave, a wanna-be dancer who discovers that his nickname doesn't quite fit and Mile End Lee, a young drug dealer. The real star of the show is Billie Tricks, played by Francis Barber, a magnificently self-obsessed disco diva who acts as the club hostess. Unlike other pop musicals such as Mamma Mia, Closer to Heaven doesn't just work a back catalogue of hits into a convenient plot line. It's actually been newly composed as a work in its own right. Philip Henshaw, I wasn't quite sure how to disentangle the deliberate kitsch from the unintentional. Can you help?

PH - Well, that's always been the things with the Pet Shop Boys. I mean, where does the irony start to bite? And I love the Pet Shop Boys, I love their electro pop - I'm showing my age now, of course - and I really approved of their not raiding the back catalogue. I think what they wanted here was a sort on Sondhiem-y, ironic, clever, witty musical with a bittersweet end, but instead what they got was a book by Jonathan Harvey. Truly terrible, inept, slack book. can't put a plot together, can't write convincing dialogue - "You must continue to be brave" - is this man a German language student? Can't create human beings. Terrible. Terrible.

TS - OK, we'll come back to the music later. Did you have a better time, Ann Robbins?

AR - I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the music because I too love the Pet Shop Boys, and I never object to watching people with absolutely great muscles dance around the stage. In fact, I enjoyed the dancing and thought it got much better in the second half. I shut my brain off quite happily because if you think about this for half a second, it falls to pieces. I liked all the pastiche, I liked Francis Barber doing this kind of low rent Nico with an accent that changed every five seconds, she had great clothes. It's this thing that you go and look at. It's kind of an over-decorated Christmas tree, it's just sort of glittery and shiny and nice and completely inconsequential.

TS - I thought one thing that did work was that it's a musical that not set in a nightclub, the whole theatre, because it's a small, intimate little theatre, The Arts Theatre, you do feel as though you're in a nightclub.

PH - It's nearer Cabaret, actually, than a musical in that way. I just hope it hangs on until Christmas because it'll be fantastic for the office Christmas parties. I hope they do it all day, in matinees, everything. But I did think what the main problem seemed was the plot petered out halfway through. I thought the first half was much more impressive than when they tried to get serious and emotional and schmaltzy. In thought in fact that no-one could act well enough to beat witness. I mean, the leading man, Straight Dave, looked like a woodland animal caught in the headlights as soon as he actually stood there on his own, and it fell apart completely at that point.

TS - And there surely isn't a closet big enough to hold him, is there? I thought that was one of the startling things, that this man should ever have been in doubt about his sexuality.

AR - We all knew.

PH - And the whole campy nonsense about the lurid boss and his sidekick. the sidekick reminded me of that sort of eye-bogglingly sycophantic serpent in The Jungle Book. You got carried away with all that side of it, you thought, yeah, at least we know where that's going if not where they're coming from. But on the other hand, as soon as they tried to get all maudlin about this drug dealer who is supposed to have died heroically, almost like a soldier in a first world war trench, you just thought, no, well actually he was a schmuck.

TS - That was a huge problem, wasn't it? If you've got a romantic triangle, all of the angles have to be equally desirable. But here one corner was actually just slimy and despicable.

AR - Wee, you didn't understand you were supposed to like him, he seemed just like this moron, you know?

PH - The thing about the drug dealer was that he was utterly unreal, he was just plot function. First he was there for the Irish boy to discover his sexuality, then he was there to die conveniently, and you could just see Jonathan Harvey going down the list of characters saying, "Somebody's got to die." And the only option was Mile End Lee. And I was so unimpressed by this trying to shock me. I mean, this was like a quiet Tuesday night around our place.

TS - And did anyone else sort of get the feeling of why is it ending now? I mean, that last song was just positively weird, it was where's the subtext to all this?

PH - I felt that well, where he sits down and says, "I'm crying for us all," well Don't Cry for Me Argentina.

AR - No resemblance to anything that had been going on. It was sort of stuck in there out of absolutely nowhere. Which most of the thing was.

TS - I think I ought to say the audience roared with laughter on the night I went. They may not have appreciated the way the book is plotted, but they certainly liked some of Jonathan Harvey's line, they found them funny. You didn't, did you?

PH - Well the night I went, it was full of people who'd backed it and I think it's actually quite difficult to base anything on that. I think they had a good time. I had a good time and I liked the songs.

TS - They're not going to have a different night I think, in a way, because this is a club musical in more than the sense that it's set in a club. It's very clubby in the sense that the jokes are in-jokes, it's a coterie comedy. It presupposes a sort of...

PH - Well, I got the jokes. the club is basically Love Muscle down The Fridge, and the record bloke is pretty close to Tom Watkins, I must say. I mean, he's not somebody to sue for libel, but it is very, very close. But even so, I wasn't that gripped by it.

TS - I thought the first number was the only one that really worked successfully. It's an opening number called My Night, which is shared between three of the principal characters, and as in a good musical song it expresses slightly different things for all of them. And that was the one moment where the musical was really in tune with what the plot was going to be, and it was telling you things. What about the rest of the songs though?

PH - I thought they wanted to produce kind of songs for a musical. There's one song for the Francis Barber character called Friendly Fire which is basically an attempt at "I'm still here." It doesn't quite work because it's not what the Pet Shop Boys do best. If they'd really stuck to their vein, I'm sure they would have produced something much, much stronger.

TS - I thought Shameless was quite good with the Andy Warhol allusion to the fifteen minutes of fame, and of course you had Posh and Backs very loosely - ha-ha - characterised. And I thought if they'd carried on in that vein they could have been much more for the general public, but as it's a bit of a cultish thing, I'm not sure.

AR - No, this is an irony-free zone. The whole thing. There was just no... It was so wide-eyed all over itself. I don't know.

TS - Well curiously it jumped from a sort of knowing, bitchy cynicism to a kind of wide-eyed innocence.

AR - I thought that was a mannered, bitchy cynicism. I didn't believe it for a second.

PH - Cynicism and sentimentality.

Saturday radio 4 show, June 2, 2001