Jesus Christ Superstar

Lyrics by Tim Rice, music by Andrew Lloyd Webber

seen at the Barbican Theatre on 15 July 2019

The double album of Jesus Christ Superstar was issued in 1971; the first Australian production (by Jim Sharman) premiered in Sydney in 1972, so it's the best part of fifty years since I first heard and saw it. Now the Barbican has revived the recent Regent's Park Open Air Theatre production designed by Tim Scutt and directed by Timothy Sheader with Robert Tripolino as Jesus, Ricardo Afonso as Judas, Sallay Garnett as Mary (Magdalene), Matt Cardle as Pilate, Samuel Buttery as Herod and Cavin Cornwall as Caiaphas.

The music holds its own, bending many styles of rock with pastiche nods to operatic convention - emotioanl numbers, a mix of solo introspection and energetic choruses. The story, basically the passion story preceded by Palm Sunday and the cleansing of the Temple, focuses on Judas's predicament as much as Jesus's, preferring to 'humanise' the Gospel traitor by giving him ostensibly higher motives for betrayal than mere greed - a disillusionment with a friend whose message is being eclipsed by his growing personality cult; and a tortured sense that he has been manipulated into a false position by exterior forces - Jesus himself? God?. Though we are probably meant to sympathise, there's an awful amount of special pleading and self-pity as Judas unravels towards his suicide.

Jesus himself remains something of an enigma, plainly not the figure Judas sees (though it is easy enough to understand Judas's point of view), but also not really seduced by crowd popularity nor prepared to indulge his followers in their easy optimism. His exasperation is by turns angry and disappointed, and the agony in the Garden is poignant, his aceptance of the inevitable alwayson a knife-edge.

Visually the production has powerful moments. Dressed in casual, not to say scruffy, clothes, the apostles form an engaging chorus moving with infectious choreography to the driving rhythms of the score. Jesus wears a loose white caftan-like shirt until his arrest. The Romans are dressed in black with white masks, thus effectively a faceless authority, while Caiaphas and the priests look as if they have blown in from a Star Wars desert tribe - probably a wise move to distract from the incipient anti-semitism of the text. The flogging scene was chillingly re-imagined with an already bloodied Jesus (obviously the victim of off-stage brutality as he is moved from Caiaphas to Pilate to Herod to Pilate) being attacked and manhandled by many different floggers who were gradually covering him with gold glitter.

The musicians were good; the singers were of course miked in the modern way (discreet appliances near the cheek), but it was a nice touch that all the major characters used hand-held mikes, often deftly passed from one to another, in a reminder that this was how things were done in the 1970s. But there were no string instruments other than guitars, which meant that the final meditative orchestral cod accompanying the deposition scene relied on plaintive wind instruments and lacked something of the melacholy sweetness of the original recording.

Worth seeing for more than old time's sake, even though there is much to criticise on philosophical and theological grounds about the interpretation of the story