Symphonies and scandal

Someone once gave me a pad of post-it notes printed with a musical stave and the caption 'Gone Chopin, Bach Soon'. If you find the idea of that joke on a repeat loop amusing, you're in for a real treat.

Subtitled The Unlikely Lives of the Great Composers, the basic premise is that we know what Brahms and Liszt got up to in their spare time, but what about the rest of them?

Graeme Garden and Callum McLeod's piece provides an experience akin to hearing the Monty Python team bellow The Philosopher's Drinking Song non-stop for 90 minutes.

We learn little and laugh even less, as an enervating sense of nerdy musical innuendo, of school geeks taking refuge in the orchestra and smirking at the mention of big batons, grows.

The composers' existences were seemingly so rackety that they resembled a modern-day soap. Thus director Richard Williams has six game actor-musicians don a succession of daft hats for some operatic shenanigans down The Dotted Crotchet, where syphilitic Schubert and love-rat Chopin compete to knock out tunes on the old Joanna.

Presiding over this unappealing combination of twee and glib is Sylvester McCoy as the narrating Showman. Got up in clown's trousers, white face and red Dr Martens, McCoy treats the script - sensibly, perhaps - as a starting point rather than something actually to be adhered to.

His fellow cast members fiddle tunefully enough, but it's safe to say they're
on a Haydn to nothing.

The Pocket Orchestra - The Unlikely Lives Of The Great Composers