Mike Batt’s “The Hunting of the Snark”

Rummaging through a forgotten drawer the other day, I dug out a dusty collection of ancient audio cassettes that hadn’t seen the light of day for years. Among them was a real oddment: a concept album for a musical theatre adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark, which tells the story of a motley ship’s crew who come ashore in a strange land, in search of a mysterious creature called – you guessed it – the Snark.

The true nature of the Snark is never revealed. At various stages we learn that this peculiar beast likes to get up late, is fond of bathing machines, and may either “have feathers, and bite” or “have whiskers, and scratch”. Most worrying of all, if you do finally succeed in your quest to capture a Snark, you’d better pray that it isn’t a Boojum. For, as the Bellman warns:

“But oh, beamish nephew, beware of the day,
If your Snark be a Boojum! For then
You will softly and suddenly vanish away,
And never be met with again!”

The Hunting of the Snark is the work of British songwriter and musician, Mike Batt. Over the course of several years, Batt developed his original concept album into a full-blown stage show that opened in Australia in 1990, then in London’s West End in 1991, at the Prince Edward Theatre. Savaged by critics, it closed after only seven weeks. Mike Batt gives his own account of the project on his personal website, here.

My first encounter with Mike Batt’s The Hunting of the Snark was a 1986 televised, costumed performance in the Royal Albert Hall. My long-lost cassette dates from the same year, so it was no real surprise that when I tried to listen to it, all that came out was mangled and demagnetised noise. Still, my curiosity was aroused. I remembered listening to the thing years ago, and enjoying it very much. Eager to revisit it, I downloaded the album from iTunes, listened to it with fresh ears and tried to decide what on Earth had possessed Batt to attempt not only an adaptation of one of Carroll’s most delicious pieces of nonsense, but a musical one to boot.

The Songs

The first thing that struck me as I set out in this voyage of rediscovery was the album’s cast list. It’s an eclectic mix of voice talent, with a range of big-name ’80s pop singers underpinned by a dream-team duo of narrators in the form of John Gielgud and John Hurt, whose rich blend of plumminess and gravelly tones lends the whole album a credibility that’s somewhat undermined by the rest of the vocals. It’s not that the individual singing performances are bad – most are very good – but the wildly differing vocal styles of artists including Cliff Richard, Roger Daltrey, Art Garfunkel, Deniece Williams and Julian Lennon make for a choppy listening experience, at least for my taste.

So how about the songs they sing? Well, they’re pretty good. There’s a powerful signature anthem called Children of the Sky, sung by composer Batt and presenting what’s effectively his mission statement for the work as a whole. Other standouts are The Bellman’s Speech (which proves that Cliff Richard can acquit himself surprisingly well when asked to sing something that might have come from Gilbert & Sullivan), the wistful Midnight Smoke and rambunctious and forthright The Pig Must Die. However, the misplaced disco beat of Dancing Towards Disaster is something I can live without.

The music is at its best when its core pop/prog rock vibe is supported by the London Symphony Orchestra. My favourite parts, in fact, are those which are entirely instrumental, such as the Introduction and the climactic The Vanishing. This latter somehow manages to combine a full-blown orchestral score with ’80s synth and sax, together with a dusting of tribal percussion and the ever reliable G&S, all without missing a beat. Batt may be best known as a composer of pop songs, but his orchestral work, as represented here, runs the gamut from witty to sublime, and is never less than spectacular.

The Story

So, is Mike Batt’s musical a fair adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s original poem? It’s a tough question to answer, not least because I’m of the opinion that Carroll’s works – including the much-loved Alice in Wonderland – more or less defy translation into any other form. Why are they so hard to adapt? The answer’s quite simple. Because they’re nonsense.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not using the word in the pejorative sense. Like Alice and Jabberwocky and all the rest of them, The Hunting of the Snark is simply not designed to add up. Nor does it contain a coherent and dramatically satisfying narrative flow. Its power (and it has considerable power, make no mistake) lies in its very absurdity, in its wordplay, and in the spaces between those words: its subtext, if a piece of nonsense can be said to have such a thing.

Mike Batt seems like a smart cookie to me, so I have no doubt he was aware of all this when he decided to take on The Hunting of the Snark. Like most other adapters of Carroll, his solution was to tease out narrative strands from the original and use them to construct something that actually makes sense. He also attempted to give the work an overarching theme. This he does well, largely through the success of the aforementioned anthem, which is woven through the album in both its lyrical and instrumental forms. Here’s the chorus:

“Don’t let the memory die,
Childen of the sky, heroes of the sea.
And as your life passes by,
Remember how it feels to be
Children of the sky”

Spinning his own words out of the source material, Batt evokes an atmosphere of yearning and adventure that manages to be both melancholy and inspirational at the same time. It perfectly matches my own feelings about Carroll’s original poem. Alone, this one song overrides my few misgivings and leads me to believe that Mike Batt’s The Hunting of the Snark may very well be a triumph.

It seems to me that Mike Batt’s The Hunting of the Snark has been more or less forgotten. Given the popularity of other musical concept albums like Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds, this is kind of surprising. Or, then again, maybe it isn’t. The quirky, meandering nature of this material never quite resolves into something dramatically satisfying. And, despite containing several sublime musical passages, The Hunting of the Snark is lacking a real showstopper. However, I know I’m judging only a fragment of the material. If only I’d seen the stage show, maybe I’d be better able to assess the piece as a whole.

What The Hunting of the Snark does possess is lashings of bravery and acres of charm. In attempting to create a musical based on one of Carroll’s lesser-known (yet still much-beloved) works, Mike Batt was himself setting out on a quest to capture an elusive beast. Did he succeed in bringing it to ground, or did his Snark turn out to be a Boojum?

Decide for yourself:

May 2024 – In revising this post with a few new snippets of information, I discovered this February 2024 update from Mike Batt. In it, he outlines his plan to create a pristine new edition of the original cast recording of The Hunting of the Snark. If he ever manages to complete this ambitious project, I’ll be first in line to listen. Here’s a snippet from the statement on Batt’s website:

“My greatest regret is that we didn’t video record the show in the West End, or do a proper audio recording … I am now starting a reconstruction, using a combination of voices from Sydney and London. I have created midi files from my original orchestral scores and am using it to trigger samples from the Berlin Philharmonic. It is sounding great!”