Festival Theatre, Edinburgh
Five stars
“Be warned,” says the minister for trade and industry
to the ship-workers whose livelihood is about to be capsized in Sting’s epic musical.
“Don’t make the same mistake as the miners.” The true blue twin-set and
hectoring tone the minister adopts are a giveaway in terms of where the attempted
destruction of a local community stems from after government-backed management
declares the yard to be unsustainable. The projected storm clouds that have
been gathering behind the expanse of steel-girdered walkways that make up the
remarkable multi-layered set by 59 Productions look like similar portents of
doom in the latest piece of musical theatre to be a gloriously rabble-rousing antidote
to hard times.
First seen on Broadway in 2014, Sting’s song-cycle of
blue-collar romance, ambition and defiance is given a new book by director
Lorne Campbell, who weaves its cross-generational strands into a cohesive soap
opera full of dramatic heart. At the centre of this is Gideon, the wayward
prodigal who fled his seemingly dead-end town, but returns to find Meg, the
woman he left behind as a teenager, but gets much more than he bargained for. As
rebellion rises amongst the workers, led with gravitas by Joe McGann’s veteran
foreman Jackie White, Gideon finally commits himself to the cause.
Campbell’s production, first seen at Northern Stage in
Newcastle, is a huge affair. Sting’s songs move between the sweet sparring
between Richard Fleeshman’s Gideon and Frances McNamee’s Meg, before evolving
into powerful chorales accompanied by a five-piece folk band. If Meg is a
latter-day Pirate Jenny, it is Katie Moore’s Ellen who represents the future in
a passionate call to arms that offers solidarity and hope in the face of all
that is currently wrong with the world.
The Herald, June 13th 2018
ends
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