Theatre reviews: The Light House | Legally Blonde
The Light House offers an illuminating look at depression, writes Joyce McMillan
Legally Blonde, King’s Theatre, Glasgow ★★★★
It’s not instantly clear what kind of story is about to be told as the stage lights go up on Alys Williams’s compelling solo show The Light House, now on a long whistle-stop tour of Scotland and northern England. Wearing heavy black oilskins, she lurches around her simple, beautifully lit set of heaped boxes like a mariner of old, yelling “man overboard”, and – with the help of swiftly recruited members of the audience – taking us through the protocol for overboard incidents at sea; shout, blow a whistle, call the bridge, throw a lifebuoy, and then stand, without moving, pointing straight at the place where the person overboard was last seen.
As the storm abates, though, we soon learn that this is all a metaphor, and a hugely powerful one. The “man overboard”, in this story, is our character’s best friend and boyfriend Nathan, suddenly lost to suicidal depression while studying in Dublin. The details of the protocol help her to understand her experience in the long months following his terrifying suicide attempt, as she shouts for help from a health system that, in Ireland as here, seems incapable of responding urgently to extreme mental distress, leaving loved ones and their carers in a limbo of long-delayed appointments and uncertain medications that devastates lives and hopes.
Williams tells this story with a beautiful and heart-wrenching mix of youthful gaiety and absolute poignancy, sometimes making a dim and drooping angle-poise lamp play the part of Nathan, sometimes resorting to her theatrical training to gain an almost magical perspective on their situation. And throughout, Williams gently lifts audience members from their seats to appear briefly as other figures in the story, including her family. In a way that never irritates, but gently connects with the truth that in the current epidemic of mental illness, this story probably speaks more directly to the experience of many audience members than they could easily admit to a roomful of strangers, were we not all bound together by the guiding light of Williams’s beautiful and true-hearted storytelling.
Legally Blonde, by contrast, tells the kind of upbeat all-American story of personal achievement and self-realisation that must drive depression sufferers to distraction. Yet there’s also something heartfelt and profoundly decent about Amanda Brown’s story of Elle Woods, the apparently empty-headed California sorority girl who follows her upwardly-mobile ex-boyfriend to Harvard Law School, only to discover the real value of a career in law. In the 25 years since the book and film first appeared, Elle’s story has only become more appealing to a generation of young woman increasingly caught between the looks-obsessed world of online social media and the demand that they build serious careers.
So it’s perhaps not surprising that the King’s, Glasgow, was packed to the rafters this weekend for the latest touring version of Legally Blonde – The Musical, with Strictly star Amber Davies on terrific form as the girl who insists she can be legally brilliant while still remaining her blonde, pink-clad and beauty-conscious self; and the show never disappoints for a second, as it powers its way through its playlist of clever, witty and heartfelt songs, all dazzlingly staged for a fine 20-strong cast in Nikolai Foster’s production.
The show has been subtly updated for the age of the indispensable mobile phone, of Instagram and influencers. And the fact that it makes that transition so smoothly speaks volumes for the sharp perceptiveness of the original story and film, which saw exactly how things were going for young women, and invited them to defy all attempts to pigeonhole them, and to insist that, on their day, women working together can indeed have, and be, it all.
The Light House is on tour until 21 May, to Ardfern, Kyle of Lochalsh, Stornoway, Ullapool, Resolis, Stirling, Peebles, Aberdeen, Lerwick, Wick and Inverness. Legally Blonde is at His Majesty’s, Aberdeen, 23-27 June, and the Playhouse, Edinburgh, 29 September until 3 October.
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