When the film of The
Full Monty was released in 1997, there was a delicious irony that it
did so a mere week after Tony Blair was elected UK Prime Minister
with a landslide victory that saw his New Labour project end eighteen
years of Conservative rule. Here, after all, was a commercial feature
film about a group of former steel-workers turned strippers in
Sheffield who had been thrown on the scrap-heap which Margaret
Thatcher's destruction of heap by industries had reduced the steel
industry to.
Fifteen years on, and
with a Conservative/Lib-Dem alliance in Westminster, Simon Beaufoy's
original screenplay of The Full Monty has been adapted for the stage.
As with the film, Beaufoy's first stage play has proved a feel-good
hit even as it deals with some very dark things, about masculinity
and the by-products of losing one's livelihood during an era of mass
unemployment.
“It's a recession
comedy,” Beaufoy says. “It was a really grim time, and it was
visibly grim. The '80s marked the end of heavy industry, so you'd
literally see factories being flattened, and entire communities left
out of work. There's something about that backdrop of an entire town
being laid off that works for the play, and which wouldn't work if we
updated it.
“This recession
doesn't work as well dramatically, because its more isolated, and
feels like its hidden and more isolated. We're no longer remnants of
the Victorian age, and instead, everyone's in their bedroom on the
internet, applying for jobs and feeling miserable.
“I remember seeing
the poster for the film saying it was a feelgood film, and I'd never
thought of it like that, to be honest. It deals with suicide
attempts, impotence, divorce, so there's very dark things going on,
but the humour is a very northern way of dealing with things, and
everyone comes pout on a big high. No-one's really doing anything
risque, but there's a wave of excitement when they get there kit off
that's not about titillation. It's about these men who've been so low
being brave enough to do this thing.”
The Full Monty was born
from an original idea Beaufoy had about making a documentary film
about a group of men painting electricity pylons across the Yorkshire
moors. Somehow this eventually morphed into a script about unemployed
male strippers that tapped into a renewed sense of optimism following
the Thatcher years which were similarly challenged in films such as
Billy Elliot and Brassed Off.
The runaway success of
The Full Monty effectively kick-started Beaufoy's career, and has
seen him pull off a similar feat of serious populism with his
screenplay for Slumdog Millionaire. Beaufoy won an Oscar for the
film, and went on to work with director Danny Boyle again with 127
Hours. With Beaufoy currently at work on a film that looks at the
rivalry between runners Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett in the run up
to the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games, one detects a theme of sorts
running through Beaufoy's work.
“It's about hope,”
Beaufoy says of The Full Monty. “We believe in the characters,
because they're real. They're the absolute opposite of men with
beautiful bodies, and that's what makes them so courageous. Over the
years I've realised that it's the end response when people come out
of a cinema or a theatre that matters, and the more complex parts can
be thought about later. With The Full Monty, that final image, it's
about the triumph of the human spirit when these men are at their
lowest ebb, that's what people respond to.”
The Full Monty, His
Majesty's Theatre, Aberdeen, until Saturday. Edinburgh Festival
Theatre, Monday March 25th-Saturday March 30th
The Herald, March 22nd 2013
ends
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