Even though the Prime Minister had just announced there will be a General Election this July, and even though Boys from The Blackstuff is a play about unemployment, class and despair, the mood was quite jaunty at the National Theatre. This was the first preview of James Graham’s adaptation of Alan Bleasdale’s 1982 TV must-watch, which officially opens next week and runs for just 21 performances on the South Bank before going to the Garrick in the West End.
Barry Sloane and Jamie Peacock in Boys from the Blackstuff
It seemed as though quite a hefty array of arts heavyweights had ignored the rain and the news, and turned out; within about ten minutes I had spotted the head of the Royal Opera House, the former head of Single Drama at the BBC; and the director of Broadcasting Standards at Ofcom. There were people greeting each other across the wide velvety fan of the Olivier stalls. This is the National Theatre crowd. This theatre is not properly national, in anything but name. It tries its best with outreach and youth programming, but its main purpose is to serve a homogenous, well-heeled, well-connected coterie who treat it like their home ground.
I salute James Graham. I respect his wish to shake theatre up a bit; to stop it being such an enclosed arena of privilege, of arts leaders and celebrities, with tickets only affordable for a few. I value his desire for theatre to discuss important, urgent issues and to be available to everyone. Dear England, his play about Gareth Southgate’s mission to inspire the England football team, also opened in London at the Olivier. It was one of the rare shows that filled the National with people who had never been to the theatre before, specifically boys and young men, many sporting full kit.
Graham has spoken, often, about a mission to bring working class concerns and voices back into the auditoria of the UK. He is an ambitious, prolific playwright whose every production while not being a state of the nation piece (although some are), certainly gives us a nuance on our national story. I fear however that Boys from the Blackstuff, while still extremely topical, in a rather grim way, isn’t going to work.
This production opened in Liverpool, where the play is set, and the fact it is transferring to London suggests it was a hit on Merseyside. It is well acted, and staged with brio and daring, the cast occasionally breaking into song and choreographed movement, and the five male leads, particularly Barry Sloane, who plays Yosser ‘Gissa job’ Hughes as a man eternally poised between violence and vulnerability, are heartfelt.
But I just don’t feel any of it landed. Yes, for those who saw, and loved the TV original, it was a reminder of the late Bernard Hill (the original Yosser), and Julie Walters and those intense days of Thatcher in her pomp, but it never really left the arena of tribute and became something unto itself. “It’s far too…Northern,” said a woman in front of me in the queue for the Ladies at the interval. Her friend agreed. What does that really mean? Nobody would ever say that about Billy Elliot, set at around the same time, dealing with many of the same concerns; incidentally also starring Julie Walters in the screen version. That also came into the West End. But it was uplifting, eternal, wondrous. The ugly duckling who became an actual Swan, dancing to Tchaikovsky at Covent Garden while his father, a coal miner, sat in the auditorium and wept. Who could forget that final, still image of Billy’s arched foot? By contrast, BFTB is ugly, sad, unfinished. Is it something London theatre audiences will go for? I don’t think so, even though it conveniently opened in their local on the South Bank.
At a cosy arts do earlier this week held by the arts headhunters Saxton Bampfylde, slightly less grand than the Buckingham Palace garden party held for the Creative Industries the week before, but involving exactly the same people, I met Sir Rupert Gavin, impresario and theatre producer, who told me he had produced Plaza Suite starring Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick, (with tickets costing around £300 each). “People these days require a star in a show,” he said.
This is what audiences want. SJP and Matthew Broderick taking their ovation in the West End.
A quick look at his CV confirms this. A quick look at current shows in the unsubsidized London West End confirms this. Even Dear England, which has Joseph Fiennes playing Southgate, is not immune. Only the giant musicals can realistically go forward without a household name in the cast, it seems.
After BFTB finished, we all herded down the stairs and out to the rainy night. I overheard some people talking behind me. “Well, I wanted £3.4, but they could only stretch to £2.7, imagine!” Ah, London house prices. That other difference between the capital and everywhere else.