It wouldn’t be summer without a bonkers musical project, filling time — although I confidently predict not nearly as much of it as the producers planned — in an otherwise dark theatre. Four years ago the seasonal silly spot gave us the cherishably dreadful Behind the Iron Mask and, proving that the worst reviews in recent West End history are no deterrent to a determined man, composer John Robinson is back to torment us with a fictional account of the last days of Ernest Hemingway.

It’s hard to know where to start with this, which is obviously a conundrum familiar to Robinson and his co-lyricist/librettist Roberto Trippini. The very first number in the published song list has been cut and the subsequent running order juggled about with, which isn’t a sign of great confidence in the material. Such scepticism is entirely justified as the dialogue is flat and the music peculiar, with song after identical song coming over all difficult and resolutely tune-free. How we long for a chorus line dressed as bulls or bells or anything vaguely Hemingway-related, instead of these four plucky performers who really should have serious talks with their agents.

We get next to no sense of Hemingway’s literary achievements as, ailing and frustrated, he twiddles his thumbs and any female body part he finds in the backwater of Ketchum, Idaho. “My words explode right off the page/ with a powerful narrative energy” runs a particularly daft couplet in the opening number Do I Make a Certain Kind of Sense? (“Nope”, said the man behind me, firmly) but Robinson and Trippini do little to flesh this out. Instead, as the set revolves giddily to display yet more mounted animal skulls, perky young secretary Louella (Tammy Joelle) strives to replace Mary (Helen Dallimore) as wife number five, and Hollywood producer Rex (Christopher Howell) tries to get Ernest (James Graeme) to sign over the movie rights to his life. Oh, the tension.

Director Pat Garrett might boast in the programme of how she “puppeteered Kermit’s legs” in the film of A Muppet Christmas Carol but there’s nothing swinging here as momentum fatally ebbs away. A couple of choice aphorisms —“Guns don’t kill people, bullets do” — raise us occasionally from our torpor, but we long for the bell to toll for poor old Ernest. Don’t despair, though: Behind the Iron Mask is currently being reworked, presumably for our delectation in summer 2010.
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