Sunny Afternoon

...Harold Pinter Theatre, Panton Street...
“Rightly raved about at Hampstead Theatre in May, and cannily whisked into the West End where it could run forever and a day, the Kinks’ musical Sunny Afternoon is a blazing triumph – as guaranteed to transport you to a state of paradisaical bliss as the fabled sight of a Waterloo sunset.

It’s more than just a deft recap – courtesy of playwright Joe Penhall – of how brothers Ray and Dave Davies, ordinary lads from Muswell Hill, came to form one of the defining bands of the Sixties. And it does more than chart the Kinks’ early highs and lows using the best of their back-catalogue.

Combining the adrenalin rush of a concert with fleet-footed theatricality, it conjures the whole youthful, rebellious spirit of the decade itself – and its many contradictions. At the start, it’s clear that a blow is being struck against the established order, as the cockney lads unleash the primal sound of rock’n’roll into a well-heeled soirée like a wrecking-ball. The toffs must learn to dance to a different beat and “oiks” can become the new aristocrats. But to get ahead, the band must sign exploitative contracts with snooty money-men who still consider themselves their betters. If you’re idealistic, poetic, socialist to boot, how do you square that with the need to fight for every cent? Tensions gather to a piercing pitch.

Though there’s a thoughtful through-line to the script, Edward Hall’s slick yet spontaneous-feeling production, presented against a potent backdrop of wall-to-wall speakers with a cat-walk thrusting out into the stalls, never loses sight of pleasure-giving principles and period-faithful thrills, down to screaming female fans and outré fashions. There’s joy unbounded in the rare spectacle of a cast that can play their instruments like pros, with only two extra on-stage musicians required to turn the theatre into a cauldron of electrifying sound.

With his tall gangly body, sleepy eyes, mischievous smile and melancholy air, John Dagleish is perfect as the shy, spontaneously composing Ray, stumbling at the first hurdle of stardom thanks to the pressures of work and demands of parenthood – a nice line in plaintive devotion from Lillie Flynn as his wife Rasa.

Though George Macguire courts caricature as “Dave the Rave”, he’s fully persuasive as the insecure, cross-dressing libertine, at one point swinging madly on a chandelier in a woman’s nightie. Full credit too to their mop-haired fellows: Adam Sopp is a percussive boy-wonder as volatile drummer Mick Avory while Ned Derrington delights as the dishy, increasingly reluctant bassist Pete Quaife.


When early on, these unlikely pop heroes let loose the hormonal frenzy of You Really Got Me, I swear you’ll get goose-bumps; it feels like the shock of the new. And when, much later, somehow visibly older and wiser, they croon Sunny Afternoon and red, white and blue ticker-tape rains down in a haze of golden light, it’s hard not to get misty-eyed. Did those long-ago summer days of 1966 – with the Kinks in their pomp – represent Britain at its best? Perhaps."
Dominic Cavendish, Telegraph