Committee, Donmar Warehouse, London, review: Sandra Marvin is superb as Camila Batmanghelidjh

This theatrical show gathers together the evidence given to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee by Batmanghelidjh and Alan Yentob, as part of the inquiry into the collapse of Kids Company

Camila Batmanghelidjh (Sandra Marvin) and Alan Yentob (Omar Ebrahim) in ‘Committee ... (New Musical)’ at the Donmar Warehouse (Manuel Harlan)

“The objective of this session/Is not to conduct a show trial,” sings the committee of MPs, “We want to learn/We want to learn/We want to learn”. Not a show trial but now a theatrical show. Its full title is The Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee Takes Oral Evidence on Whitehall’s Relationship with Kids Company. The idea of a verbatim musical was pioneered by Adam Cork and Alecky Blythe in London Road about the Ipswich murders that occurred between 2006 and 2008. It’s as though that piece’s experiments in creating a libretto that uses the rhythms of real speech have been applied to one of the Tricycle’s renowned Tribunal plays that reconstructed public inquiries, such as the Stephen Lawrence and Hutton Inquiries. Hadley Fraser and Josie Rourke, the Donmar’s artistic director, have fashioned a book and lyrics that are based on transcripts of the evidence session in October 2015 when Camila Batmanghelidjh, the CEO and founder of Kids Company and Alan Yentob, chair of the trustees (and BBC grandee) were grilled about the financial management of the company that had received some £42 million from successive governments, including a final £3 million bailout just before its collapse in the previous August. The questioning is interspersed with testimony from others involved (employees, a deputy children’s commissioner, Oliver Letwin et al) – some of it favourable, some not.

So what does Tom Deering’s score add to our perception of the proceedings? Powerfully played by a piano and string quartet under Torquil Munro’s musical direction, it certainly heightens our awareness of the irreconcilable differences in world-view between the committee (who sit in a semi-circle facing us and them) and the two witnesses (whose faces are projected on large screens). The limitations of both groups are brought out through the interplay between the spoken and the lyric. In impatient, stabbing rhythms, the former demand short, concise answers and fixate on figures (pulling out an array of the £150 shoes that so affront them). A brilliantly colourful anomaly amidst the subdued institutional tones, Sandra Marvin's superb Batmanghelidjh rises to appeal to us in passionate arias, a slippery mix of fierce conviction and (when it comes to dialogue) maddening evasiveness about numbers and her qualifications. Genuine fervour and compunction fight it out with name-dropping pomposity in Omar Ebrahim’s beautifully sung Yentob.

Kids Company was supposed to advance the agenda for David Cameron’s Big Society. In fact, it foundered partly because it tried to look after too many desperate, vulnerable children that were being failed by other agencies. In making its not unreasonable objections (that the company was creating an unsustainable culture of dependency and a personality cult; that the failure to build up long-term reserves could wind up being catastrophic for the children), the committee seem to lose sight of a fundamental question: what are the underlying causes of child poverty, how should they be addressed and by whom? Committee uses up too much of its 80 minutes’ running time at the start by bringing us jokily up to date with the political careers of the participants. But the ensemble is terrific in Adam Penford’s assured, compelling production (Alexander Hanson captures to perfection the tart smarminess of the chairman, Bernard Jenkin). And the instrumentalists expertly convey the score’s range between lushness and shuddery discordance. “A vacuum of leadership yet again/Their problems remain unresolved” sings Batmanghelidjh at the end, raising questions about ultimate accountability that, in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire, have a new grim relevance.