Theatre
Play it again, Rudi
by Harry Ricketts
It all started with a cigar and some verses by a crime reporter-cum-poet. It being “Gloomy Sunday”, the 1930s international hit song composed by the self-taught Jewish Hungarian pianist Rudi Seress. Louis Armstrong covered it. Billie Holiday covered it. Bing Crosby covered it. There were even versions in Chinese and Japanese. Suicides were found clutching the sheet music. It was dubbed “the song of death”.
Peter Muller’s play Gloomy Sunday tells Seress’s life-story. Director and lead actor Teodor Surcel had a successful run with the show in Christ-church in 2003 and has now brought it to Wellington. The play should again pull in audiences, not least those who saw the (rather different) movie with the same title and those who have enjoyed recent musical biopics like Ray and De Lovely.
The play’s conceit (similar to that of De Lovely) is that the now dead Seress is replaying key scenes from his life, trying to make sense of what happened to him, trying, as he puts it, “to settle the bill”. (Whether he ever does “settle” it is a question the play wisely leaves open.) Interspersed with the flashback scenes are reminiscences, audience jokes (“Don’t worry. This is a clean show”) and of course plenty of songs (well mimed by Surcel).
Gloomy Sunday is not perhaps a great play, any more than the slick De Lovely and the engaging but psychologically reductive Ray are great movies. But, admirably, it does try to show us both a particular life and a life in context. So we see not only Seress the Little Pipe bar pianist and difficult husband but also Seress the permanently damaged survivor of a Nazi labour camp who, on resuming his old life in Budapest, finds his songs banned by the Stalinist regime.
Surcel, a Romanian by birth and upbringing, gives an accomplished and sympathetic performance as Seress. (The programme notes suggest a strong, personal identification with the part.) He is ably assisted by Petrina Williams, as Seress’s loyal and much put-upon wife Helen, and by Joel Allan, who plays various cameo roles, including the waiter in the Little Pipe tavern, a Nazi corporal and an intrusive neighbour.
Muller’s play helps us to understand why, for so many, the song “Gloomy Sunday” so evocatively caught the mood of the 30s, W H Auden’s “low dishonest decade”. This lively, often entertaining production reminds us, if we needed it, that things haven’t got any better.
GLOOMY SUNDAY, by Peter Muller; directed by Teodor Surcel, Circa Studio, Wellington (until April 9).
