HOWZAT

Cynics may sneer that the music sounds tinny, the production looks low-rent compared to many West End extravaganzas and that the script is hardly Shakespeare. But by the time three middle-aged women break into Chiquitita halfway through the first act, it’s hard not to smile, albeit a little incredulously. Therein, of course, lies its appeal. Craymer delightedly quotes one New York critic who said it was like going to a karaoke bar after you’ve taken Ecstasy. It is, she says, a tonic, and doesn’t pretend to be anything else.

“We couldn’t have made it Chekhov, but it has Shakespearian themes,” she says. “The three dads, the mistaken identities… It’s lasted this long because you don’t have to be an Abba fan. It won over the cynics, and people who don’t see themselves as Abba fans. They enjoy the story and being taken on a fun journey to the Greek islands.”

And because Craymer and her cohorts have kept tight creative control over every aspect of every production, all over the world, standards are, well, standard. It’s partly control freakery, but also practical: Abba would never countenance selling the rights to the songs for anyone to do with as they liked. So there are associate creative teams putting together productions all over the world, from Las Vegas to Seoul, and a full-time workshop in London churning out costumes. Every country has indigenous casting directors, and songs translated into their own languages. Only the choruses stay in English, because they reckoned that was the bit of the song that most people knew the words to. Besides, as Craymer points out, “‘Gimme gimme gimme’ just doesn’t exist in Japanese.”

As to her claim that you don’t have to be an Abba fan to enjoy Mamma Mia!, it seems incomprehensible that anyone who didn’t grow up singing Dancing Queen into a hairbrush would want to go. But if a random Wednesday night at the West End production is anything to go by, it’s true. By the first interval, everyone said they were enjoying it because of the story, and only one group of people, five Norwegian women tourists, claimed to be Abba fans. The audience was mostly middle-aged and up. John, a Canadian man with a perm, was typical. In London on holiday, he had come with his wife. Is he an Abba fan? He shrugs. “Not really, no.” So why are you here? “The hotel told us about it. We just thought it’d be fun.”

An honourable exception is Emma Stibbs, 39. Emma works at Tesco in Basingstoke and is a member of its social club, 40 of whom have come along tonight. She happily admits to being an Abba fan and is hoping for a good singsong. “The club organised for us to go to Grease last year,” she says ruefully, “but it was rubbish. This is far better.”

“I think,” says Craymer, “that the show has a vast appeal to women, but one that doesn’t exclude men. And part of its success is that they like to come back again. We have a huge repeat audience.”

As luck would have it, one of those women to whom it appealed was Meryl Streep, who wrote a letter to the Broadway cast saying how much she’d enjoyed it. When it came to casting the film, they must have hardly dared hope. But, less than three weeks after asking, they found themselves in New York, faced with the woman herself saying, “So, do you want me to do it?” (They said, ‘Yes, please.’) Apparently, Streep can sing, as can co-stars Colin Firth and Pierce Brosnan, which seems even more implausible. But the shoot was, she says, enormous fun, and you imagine it probably was: there seems little downside to spending a few months on a Greek island singing Abba songs with Meryl Streep, James Bond and Mr Darcy.

But what of Craymer herself? She sold a decade of her life to Mamma Mia!. She’s single and childless, hasn’t had a holiday in years and says she can’t remember what life was like before. The money, she says, has mainly been a relief. It’s been a decade in which both her parents died. (One of the last things her father, a lawyer, did was help her draw up her will. The show had taken off, “and I said, ‘Dad, it might make more than £20,000.’ I think he probably felt he could go now.”) She doesn’t have children because she always thought she wasn’t old enough, “and now I’m 50. I’ve always put work first. I don’t think I’ve sacrificed anything because it’s what I wanted to do. You don’t go into this business for financial gain, you go into it because you have a passion for it.”

Back at the Prince of Wales Theatre, they’re working themselves up to have a good old sing-along. First it took the West End, next it takes the big screen. And Craymer, maybe, will take a holiday.

Mamma Mia! is released on July 11

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