1977: Lionel Fire Angel Dean Maggie Drake's Dream

‘It's not my show. It may be garbage. It may be an obituary,’ Lionel Bart told the press before the opening night of Lionel (New London Theatre, 16 May 1977; 40) This ‘musical created from the works of Lionel Bart, Composer N.E.1’ was an indignity that beggared belief, visited on the man who, seventeen years earlier, had been the saviour of the London, if not the British, musical. Society photographer Alan Warren, modestly describing himself in the theatre programme as a ‘multi-talented personality’, conceived and produced this disastrous tribute, hiring John Wells to write a script that had a very young Bart centrestage, flashing forward in time via a plotline that managed to grind its troubled subject's face deeper into the dirt. Inhabiting a sort of pastoral Stratford East, ‘Li’, played by adolescent Todd Carty, has dreams that take him off to wherever provided an excuse for one of Bart's old songs. Thus, Li's nightmare about war throws up ‘Who's This Geezer Hitler?’ from Blitz!, and so on through thirty numbers. Two practised performers of Bartiana, Avis Bunnage and Aubrey Woods (a Fagin take-over in the original Oliver!), had the style necessary for this stuff, but Lionel, mercilessly recalling Bart's recent years of failure, bankruptcy and professional isolation, must have been a difficult thing for its off-stage hero to stomach.

Bart had been banned from rehearsals, but did see the show, accompanied by his teddy-bear. The critics, for once, were united with him in not taking it seriously. Michael Billington lamented ‘a plot-line that is fatuous to the point of incomprehensibility’, while the Sunday Telegraph looked on as ‘dreams turn to nightmares, and nobody pays his bills’ in a show that ‘carries foolhardiness into the area of masochism’. It surely deserved B. A. Young's description of a ‘save-trouble musical’, cobbled together by choreographer Gillian Gregory, unable to disguise the fact that ‘Revisiting these songs now reveals them as ephemeral.