Who knew blunt force trauma could be so enjoyable? Starlight Express is back . And it’s a two-and-a-half-hour neon fever dream, where people on roller skates in iridescent costumes pretend to be trains, set in space, or the future, or something. It’s more spectacle than sense, an extraordinary creative onslaught, with songs about steam engines cranked out at max volume, all designed to delight your inner child – which it really does.
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s first (and better) attempt at the Cinderella story took theatre to new levels of excess when it opened 40 years ago in London. Mostly what people remember of it now is that the cast were on roller skates pelting around a specially reconfigured theatre at speeds of up to 30mph, something that, during its Nineties heyday, saw it named the West End’s most injury-prone show . This revival in the reworked Troubadour space, directed by Luke Sheppard (who helmed & Juliet and the Live Aid musical ), is a tamer affair, but there’s still a sense of jeopardy as performers clad in huge otherworldly costumes rocket past, and ushers tell us to keep fingers well clear, and that we can only leave our seats in an emergency.
And though it starts gently enough, with a little boy or girl (it varies each night) called Control playing with their trains, being sung to sleep by mum, it quickly pumps itself up to maximum. Soon there are dozens of train-people, in the imagination of Control, who spend most of the first act introducing the.