The King & I wows at Oxford

The King and I at New Theatre Oxford, from October 3 – 7 . Review by JON LEWIS

BARTLETT Sher’s sumptuous Lincoln Center New York production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King And I, a musical first produced in 1951, hits the ground running from the first scenes.

When the boat carrying schoolteacher Anna Leonowens (Maria Coyne) enters a foggy Bangkok harbour in 1861, the wharves teeming with traders and paupers all hoping for coins from foreigners’ purses, the scenography is thrilling.

Anna is immediately inducted into the inequalities in Siam when she enters the palace with its golden Buddha, a room full of wives bowing down to their deity, the King (Brian Rivera).

Slavery and freedom are the key themes of the musical. The show’s marquee moments are displayed in a stunningly conceived scene where a Burmese slave, Tuptim (Marienella Phillips), who is given as a concubine from the Burmese to the King, is convinced by Anna to present a drama to the King and a visiting British diplomat, Anna’s former beau Sir Edward Ramsay (Sam Jenkins-Shaw).

Tuptim narrates her Siamese version of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, reinvented as The Small House of Uncle Thomas with every image intended as a dagger thrust towards the King.

Tuptim is dangerously challenging the King’s divine right to rule and arguing for change.

Catherine Zuber’s wonderful costumes, with actors masked as hunting dogs and vicious soldiers, and with the escapee Eliza (Rachel Wang-Hei Lau) hopping away from the vicious slaver King, Simon of Legree (Qinwen Xue), resplendent in gold, are astounding.

The high-pitched trills and shouts of the chorus make for thrilling theatre.

This sequence also demonstrates Anna’s educative, and subversive impact on the court.

Eliza only succeeds because Buddha freezes the river with snow, and Tuptim learned about snow in one of Anna’s lessons to the King’s children.

Anna is a poster girl for sensible decision-making, commonsense values and pragmatic stiff upper-lips, a feminist icon and single mother bringing up her son Louis (Charlie McGuire).

Her exhortation to be fearless, sung in the early number I Whistle a Happy Tune, emboldens Siamese society to face the challenges of a new, scientific, global future.

A must-see production.