Yahoo Finance Just For One Day review: ★★ Shockingly tone deaf musical
Just For One Day review and star rating: ★★
A musical about the Live Aid concert of 1985 has to be one of the most curious propositions ever made for a musical, mainly because in recent years the charity event couldn’t have fallen further out of fashion.
Live Aid has been widely criticised for representing an out-of-date notion of charity that centres the white experience and that, all things considered, didn’t ultimately work in helping us break the cycle of famine in Africa.
Before I go on anymore I should say that this production looks and sounds majestic. It features absolutely banging songs, including a rendition of much of the actual Live Aid show, and an absolutely hilarious rapped routine between leader of Live Aid Bob Geldof and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that is incredibly entertaining.
And yet, you just can’t stop coming back to the idea that staging a celebratory show about an out-of-date movement given the current social climate feels utterly tone deaf.
We’re flitting between the early-mid 1980s when the Live Aid concerts that brought together the world’s biggest stars, including The Who, Queen, Sting and David Bowie, were being arranged by Bob Geldof, who is presented as an angry, precocious man who didn’t handle his emotions well, and retrospective scenes in the present day where Gen Z youths reflect on the movement with a critical eye.
Programme material suggests the show holds a “contemporary lens” up to Live Aid by questioning what the historical show could have done better. Critics call out the whole Live Aid moment and their messages such as the famous “feed the world, let them know it’s Christmas time” as deeply patronising and unhelpful, and although a tremendous amount of money was raised, some estimations say the African continent is experiencing worse famine issues today than it was forty years ago.
Director Luke Sheppard says he hopes his show reflects on how Live Aid happened when “we’re in a world that is so full of division” today. The trouble is the show really exceeds when it… just stages live versions of the smash hit songs that rock bands like The Who played during the big concert. Nostalgic older audience members toe tap along, and in the entertainment stakes, it’s a brilliant watch. Any proper interrogation of the movement falls by the wayside.
Have we learned nothing? Elements incorporating the Ethiopian experience featuring aid worker Amara, played by Abiona Omonua, feel too minimal and performative to really interrogate the Live Aid movement through a “contemporary lens.” We learn that there was corruption in the country that stopped the food donated via Live Aid’s money reaching the people who needed it most, and that corruption also stopped people accessing supplies. But these stories from the ground are fleeting and undercooked compared to the shimmering Live Aid show dazzlingly imagined by Matthew Brind, who did the musical arrangements for shows like The X Factor.
Towards the end there is one mention about how a more sustainable approach to charitable giving is needed in the modern age, through education and community driven work rather than by the ‘white saviour’ practices of sending food or provisions overseas. But it is a troublingly brief moment in a play too concerned with nostalgic throwbacks to a big rock show that happened forty years ago rather than offering any deep examination into famine or charitable giving.
The script by John O’Farrell is frequently tone deaf, including in one act 1 segment where the lyrics “feed the world, let them know it’s Christmas time” are repeatedly sung slowly, as if that condescending message is in any way one to cherish. It’s baffling how Sheppard thought that was a line to linger over.
You cannot escape the feeling that this is a show written by a white writer about an out of date charitable event run by white people who tell us at the end that “it worked” when they refer to the Live Aid mission, when experts told us it generated a false narrative. We know so much better now about ways we can sustainably offer help.
In another world Just For One Day would properly interrogate where white aid went wrong over the past forty years. But here is another musical putting white saviour stereotypes first. Worst of all, you get the impression all these people standing up and clapping at the end will go home none the wiser about the plight of impoverished nations around the world.
Just For One Day plays at the Old Vic until 30 March
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