Don't cry for me

I got to see the best coup de theatre in the West End

The cast of Evita. Photo: Marc Brenner

I’ve hardly been in London this week (Manchester for this, Sussex for this, Kenilworth for this, and last week I was in Yorkshire for this, and then, as you know, that music festival that you couldn’t escape from for about four weeks on the BBC).

What I’ve seen

But of the few things I’ve squeezed in this week, one has also been broadly inescapable – Jamie Lloyd’s production of Evita at the Palladium, starring Snow White and West Side Story star Rachel Zegler as Eva Perón, wife of president Juan Perón and, eventually, official Spiritual Leader of the Nation of Argentina.

It’s an absolute barnstormer of a show, stripped back to a set of simple bleachers which the energetic cast dance up and down (the choreography, by Fabian Aloise, is great) with the only real prop being the blonde wig that Zegler dons to do the famous balcony scene, when she sings Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina to the crowd that is now gathering nightly outside the theatre on Argyle Street.

Let’s start with that. The people getting upset because it’s being sung to the great unwashed and not directly at the paying customers (who, by the way, have by far the better view, because it’s filmed so well) are missing the point. From the vantage point of the seated audience, this is probably the most ingenious, intelligent, dazzling coup de theatre I have seen anyone execute in my life.

The camera panning across the heaving crowd in real time is perfect. That scene, where Evita speaks to the people of Argentina from her position of privilege as the president’s wife, reminding them that she’s really one of them under the jewels and the Dior dresses, is meant to show Eva Perón’s mass popular appeal. And every single one of the 21st century people outside hangs on her every word.

It is a brilliant, precision-tooled theatrical device, giving a brief indication of her magic (which is sorely needed), and a sense of how easy it is to get swept up in something. It’s genuinely amazing.

Zegler is incredible. Her voice, her energy, her star power is undimmable. The score is one of Lloyd Webber’s best, though his use of electric guitars always gives me the ick.

But. I think that the Jamie Lloydification of this (the stripping back, the monochrome aesthetic, the haze), though it creates a crackling energy, has unintentionally revealed something rather unpleasant about the show itself, which is that though it purports to be about Evita, it sort of hates her. How many ways, it seems to ask, mockingly, can we call this fascinating, electrifying, resilient woman a whore?