THEATRE

ROBERT GORE-LANGTON

Aspects Of Love

Lyric Theatre, London Until November 11, 2hrs 20mins ★★★★★

Brokeback Mountain

@sohoplace, London Until August 12, 1hr 30mins ★★★★★

Michael Ball is back in the 1989 Andrew Lloyd Webber show that gave Ball his No2 chart hit, Love Changes Everything. This time Ball – plump and deeply genial – plays the old roué part, Sir George Dillingham, a champers-swigging art forger. To prevent an audience riot, Ball has been reassigned his signature song, which he utterly nails.

Director Jonathan Kent has retooled this bonking boudoir musical – lyrics by Don Black and Charles Hart – about a bunch of self-obsessed bohemians. There are new orchestrations and some changes. For example, the leading man Alex’s creepy infatuation with a young girl, who’s now older, at 18. (It’s still queasy, though.)

The show explores, over a 20-year post-war period, love’s various aspects – especially the horizontal. Jamie Bogyo is the dull but handsome Alex, the young lover of actress Rose (Laura Pitt-Pulford, a total pro). She, in turn, marries old George, who suddenly snuffs it when their young daughter Jenny (Anna Unwin, below with Ball) falls for the now older Alex. At the funeral, Alex rolls in the hay with sculptress Giulietta (Danielle de Niese), though she’s got a thing going with Rose. What stands out from this frankly daft daisy chain of dalliances – set against John Macfarlane’s lush, painterly backdrops of France and Venice – is the passionate score: sinuous, very beautiful and evoking love, wine and roses.

Brokeback Mountain is the gay cowboy hit film of 2005 (based on an Annie Proulx short story), in which two lads guarding sheep in Wyoming fall in love. It’s 1963 – a bad time and place for young men to do such a thing. Written by Ashley Robinson, this campfire tale, however, proves the rule that drama in tents isn’t always intense. But it is certainly sad and Eddi Reader’s live Country music adds a sense of lament.

Mike Faist plays Jack, and Lucas Hedges is Ennis. We see them over 20 years, snatching occasional ‘fishing trips’, their secret love slowly poisoning Ennis’s marriage. His wife, nicely portrayed by Emily Fairn, knows but never says anything. It’s a well-acted show but it’s stagebound. It never once banished my memory of the devastating film with its epic landscapes.