THOUGH few of those attending The King and I at the Olympia will bother with such questions, it is nevertheless instructive to consider what was going on when Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical was first produced in News York in 1951. The Cold War was descending into its depths, and South-East Asia was emerging as, its cockpit. The Korean War, eventually to cost over a million" lives, was in full swing. America was moving more and more surely into involvement in Vietnam, with military aid in that year alone of $500 million, and the first civilian "advisers" moving into Saigon. A great human disaster was in the making.
It was in this context that Rodgers and Hammerstein, who had already created in South Pacific an enthralling image of romantic war in Asia, adapted the story of Anna Leonowens, a Welsh woman who served as governess to the King of Siam's children in the 1860s. And the musical they created stands, as perhaps the last great outpouring of innocence in American culture. It is a fragment of a time before the fall, a time when it was still possible to believe that western involvement in south-east Asia could be wholly benevolent.
Oscar Hammerstein, who wrote the book and the lyrics, was the kind of man who wept when he heard z "The Surrey With the Fringe on Top", the kind of man who could not really believe in evil: "I've met a couple of villains in my life", he said, "but most people are trying so hard - sometimes they fail, but they try - to be good to one another." And this good nature is translated into a genuine and sincere political liberalism, a belief that an idealised version of American political values - truth, justice and the American way - will lead to happy endings at all times and in all places.
Such liberalism, of course, is wickedly paradoxical, and those paradoxes were to play themselves out in Vietnam in the destruction of village's in order to liberate them, the murder of civilians in order to save them. To its credit, The King and I for all its conventional fantasies, is complex enough to suggest at least some of the paradoxes. In it, Anna is a carefully ambiguous figure, bringing western enlightenment to Siam on the one hand, but protecting Siam from western (conveniently British) colonialism on the other. The Thais are in need of liberation from their ignorance and superstition, but yet they are not barbarians, and proving this to western eyes is the pivot on which the plot turns.
THE centre of the show, and Hammerstein's most intricate and ambiguous piece of theatre, is a play-within-a-play, a performance by the ladies of the harem of a version of Uncle Tom's Cabin, staged in order to impress the visiting British representative that Siam is a civilised country. Within this play, there is a genuine dramatic tension rare in conventional musicals, the women are also using the story of Eliza's escape from slavery to make their own point to the king about his subjugation of them. And it acts, too, as a backhanded reminder to an American audience that barbarism and tyranny belong in their own history as well as in Siam's. Around this sequence, everything else is within the expected range of 1950s musical safety.
Brian Merriman, in his production at the Olympia, recognises the importance of the play-within-a-play and lavishes most of the considerable invention and daring at his command on it. The staging is not strikingly original - it follows closely on that in the film version of the musical, though without the ornate and expensive masks. But it is done with such vigour, skill and precision that it has a genuinely startling freshness, The dancing especially by J.J. Formento and Shereen Lawlor - is superb, as are Pat Murray's design and Paul Keogan's lighting. While it lasts, you can believe that these 1950s musicals do have the capacity to attain both subtlety and power.
Inevitably, perhaps, this richness is a powerful reminder of the relative blandness of everything else. It is not that the playing and staging ever fall below high standards, just that the songs are mostly dull and coy, and that the opportunities for acting that has any degree of complexity are severely limited. The innocent benevolence of the main story is so overwhelming that it defies Gemma Craven as Anna and Stephen Brennan as the King, both actors of real power, to do much more than ride it out. Craven, of course, is consummate, holding the stage and the audience with apparently effortless ease, but it is not a consummation devoutly to be wished.
The real drama lies instead in the distance between then and now, in the gap between the fantasy of a benevolent encounter between west and east and the reality of the true barbarism that was beginning to unfold. There is something poignant, something elegiac, in watching the last rays of a national innocence illuminate the stage, knowing that that innocence fed two subsequent decades of unimaginable horror.
