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We're back for another week of what's hot and what's absolutely not

Al Knott (Greaseball) in Starlight Express. Photo: Pamela Raith

It was during the second act reprise of Starlight Express’s eponymous torch song, a number about, I think, finding your self-belief among the stars, designed to jerk tears from its audience, that I thought, WTF. This is a show about trains.

What I’ve seen

Evidently there is some major nostalgia attached to this absolutely mad piece of work, because despite the fact that it cannot possibly be for anyone but children, the audience was 99.9 percent adults. I didn’t see it the first time around, but clearly many people did, and love it. A grown man behind me kept shouting “Rusty we love you!” as Jeevan Braich, playing said steam locomotive, rolled anguishedly around the track, battling self-doubt.

The premise, if you can call it that, is an extended dream-sequence conjured by a sleepy young boy about his toy trains (two steam trains, a hysterically camp electric train, a diesel locomotive and a bunch of others of indeterminate power source), racing each other. Possibly in space. Unclear.

A switchover to hydrogen happens quite late on in the storyline, but my understanding of the science behind that particular plot twist remains hazy, though it does date the show. There’s also a cursory romance between Rusty and a flighty first class carriage called Pearl, who could do better but also doesn’t deserve him.

I thought that this would be just the right level of ridiculous to cheer me up after a thoroughly dispiriting afternoon, and for a while, fuelled by a large glass of nearly drinkable rosé, it worked, but I definitely reached total saturation point very soon after the interval and long before the end.

Starlight Express is a Lloyd Webber classic, but despite some highly dubious sexual innuendo (“Toot toot, nobody does it like a steam train”. God help us) and a train and/or fuel pun shoehorned in at every given opportunity, the lyrics are mostly still atrocious - repetitive and meandering, like something a child would make up.