Rockabye: don't tell Madonna

7 Feb 2024 - Photos by Sam Moffatt

Pop star Sidney Jones was famous enough to have a huge faux-Warhol created in her honour. It looms over the Factory Theatre stage, not only as a symbol of the fleetingness of fame, but as a convenient distraction during the frequent set changes. Jones has been treading water artistically and commercially but, just like The Hoff, she is still huge in Germany. We first meet her in the midst of a rapid-fire overlapping conversation with her assistant Julia. They speak in fragments, each aware the other knows what they mean, and pop culture references. It is light, mildly funny and the audience settles in for an amiable satire on show business. Sidney is about to promote a comeback album, one that might be her last hope as she is either approaching, or past, 40 which is apparently—don't tell Madonna—the cut off date for female pop star relevancy. Sidney's manager, Alfie, has found the one journalist who admires the new album, the other reviews are lukewarm at best, and has pinned his hopes on an interview with Tobias Beresford, henceforth known as "the arbitrator."

That is, once you've mixed in Sidney's boy toy Jolyon who has an ambiguous relationship with Julia, enough plot to drive a satire. Except that playwright Joanna Murray-Smith has something else in mind. Sidney screams, "There is more to life than rock n' roll. I have to have this baby," and once the audience stops laughing, we realize it was meant to be serious. Sidney is (shades of Madonna who is oddly never referenced though Angelina Jolie is) planning to adopt an orphan from Africa. Cue Layla, a social worker who has to sign off on the adoption. There is a twist after intermission, but it serves more as a mild visual coup de theatre and an opportunity to ogle the butt of Christopher Allen (Redbone Coonhound, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, Orphans for the Czar). Sadly not enough to be worthy of notifying Madonna. From there Rockabye devolves into debates on adoption, cross-cultural adoption, racism, the merits of Das Boot, ageism, The Ronettes vs the Carpenters, journalistic ethics and a short bizarre segment on lesbian parenting. 

Murray-Smith can write witty lines—"love is just gratitude for finding someone to indulge your self-delusions" and "bring out the Amy Winehouse and suppress the Mia Farrow, don't mention Africa"—but not enough of them to support almost three hours of relentless pontificating. The cast works hard to keep the audience involved, and director Rob Kempson (Box 4901, The Way Back to Thursday) keeps the action and dialogue moving, but the final result is unfortunately flat and draggy. That the music business is evil (though Sergio Di Zio [Between Riverside and Crazy] nails the frantic smarmy seductiveness of a manager pushed to the brink financially and morally) is old news, and the references are a mix of contemporary and '80s. An internal if confusing logic as contemporary pop music consists mostly of regurgitated and resuscitated '80s pop. Deborah Drakeford (Redbone Coonhound, Doubt, Human Animals) is light on the diva, which robs her role of much of its humour and centrality. Playing a performer who's been so packaged that she no longer knows what emotions are real while promoting an album that is revealing a true self that no longer even exists, is a conundrum that robs any of Sidney's motivations of their power. And Drakeford's star power is never given a chance to dazzle.

Allen has fun with a fragile ego and a need to not only deliver a shocking story, but to avoid, as a fraud himself, being the story. Shauna Thompson (Prodigal, Orphans for the Czar) as Layla expresses passion fervently but the speeches, by the time she reaches her dilemma, are wearing and the back and forth with Allen, despite being the crucial crux of the second act, quickly becomes tiresome. Nabil Traboulsi is comic relief and has a great time trying on accents and pretensions with just enough failed former rock star skinny sexiness to be believable. Poor Kyra Harper is stuck in a drab role that seems to have wandered in from a pop music riff on All About Eve, but Julie Lumsden as the beleaguered assistant is a flippant delight as she banters with Traboulsi and Drakeford. Even more so when it becomes open warfare with Drakeford. Everything is polished, thought out and presented passionately, it just fails to ignite as the script meanders from point to point, speeding along but never gaining momentum. Great pop music can take shallow thoughts and ideas and glossy them up to seem momentous. Perhaps Rockabye is trying to vivisect pop music by taking momentous ideas and instead of a three minute cri de coeur, stretch and inflate it into three hours of theatre. Madonna, meet The Hoff.