Devil is in the details

If art were measured by expenditure of spirit, this Motion Group collaboration at the Old Vic would win every prize going. Iraqi and British actors have pooled skills to make an Anglo-Arabic, parallel text version of Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale, the story of a poor fool beguiled into selling his soul to the Devil.

You can see the journey these performers have travelled, in the case of the director Andrew Steggall to Baghdad itself, to put their work on stage. Their effort sings out, and no doubt for each individual the rewards have been considerable.

For the audience watching, however well disposed - and I suspect we all were - this brave optimism was not enough to make good theatre. The beauty of Stravinsky's 1918 original, a tight, nervy, ice-cold piece for seven instruments and narrator, is its economy. By at once shaving and adding, melding and expanding, here it has grown diffuse and confused. Verbosity replaces rigour and the familiar story is almost lost in the telling.

The problems had nothing to do with the double language aspect, presumably only fully understood by a tiny bilingual minority. On the contrary, hearing the Iraqi actors' stylised delivery was a pleasure, their emotions easily understood, their actions beautifully choreographed.

Falah al Flayeh's chameleon-like changes of persona as narrator, and the dignity in defeat of the Soldier (Ala'a Rasheed), made lasting impressions. The Arabic music, too, dominated by lutelike oud and sensual, percussive qunan, worked its own mesmerising charm.

But the English-speaking cast (Julian Glover, Martin Marquez, Ciaran McMenamin) were hampered by a clumsy translation, full of dud, attention-grabbing rhymes that clotted the story-telling and muddied characterisation. Glover blundered through the narration, making it, bizarrely, less comprehensible than the Arabic.

The European musicians, hidden in the wings except when participating in the action, had difficulty maintaining the crisp ensemble, essential for Stravinsky's taut score. Only the solitary violinist, who joined in manfully with his fellow Arab musicians, really bridged the cultural divide.

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The Soldier's Tale