Woody Sez at the Arts Theatre,
London WC2
Libby Purves
Last updated January 18 2011 2:56PM
Any fool can make something complicated. It takes a genius to make it simple.” Woody Guthrie said so, and in this biographical tribute David M. Lutken achieves a warm simplicity: indeed a connection so profound in the little auditorium that when it ended, two hours on, I felt genuinely bereft. If you sneer at hillbilly and protest songs and resist conversion, stay away. If you jib at Guthrie’s communism, born of the Depression and the drifting dustbowl years, either open your mind or save the seat for someone with a heart.
This full-length premiere grew out of an hour-long Edinburgh piece and years of enthusiasm. As Woody (whom he much resembles — lanky, dark, sardonic) Lutken relates the life, letting the songs illustrate it with the help of Andy Teirstein, Helen J. Russell and Darcie Deaville: all seasoned folk performers, unglamorous and at ease. They play their multiple instruments like fiends: guitars, fiddles, banjos, bass, whistle, spoons, harmonica, zither — throwing in buskers’ tricks and catching all the Guthrie moods: melancholy, playful, angry, funny, affectionate, defiant: the work-songs and campfire laments of the poor.
At its heart is the personal story. His mother (Helen Russell, a lovely voice) calls the child Woody to sing an old song with her — Gypsy Davey, poignant in its hints of female rebellion. She is touched already by the insanity of Huntington’s disease, which was to kill him too. His sister’s death in a fire which may have been the mother’s doing is hauntingly, briefly told, mirrored in the future irony of his own small daughter’s death by fire. In between, Woody is on the bum in the Depression, living among migrant workers, getting blacklisted, infuriating the “sissified censorship” of radio stations to make music for “people who cain’t afford a radio, nor a home to set it in”.
But social and political outrage are tempered with mellow warmth, enfolding and including us. We may not live where “wheat growed, oil flowed, dust blowed, the farmer owed”, yet we have mean bankers, migrant workers haunt our orchards too, and “I ain’t got no home” resonates across Leicester Square as rough sleepers huddle. “Everybody might be just one big soul,” says Woody. “So everywhere you look in the day or night, that’s where I’m gonna be.”
He’s here. It’s a special relationship.