Theatre Royal, Glasgow
Four stars
Down by the docks they’re talking tough in James Graham’s stage adaptation of Alan Bleasdale’s classic twentieth century TV drama. For the unlikely Liverpool lads thrown on the scrap heap in the thick of 1980s Thatcher’s Britain, all that talk won’t pay their rent or feed their kids. As each man moves from dole office to cash in hand desperation to an increasingly volatile home life, the Kafkaesque absurdities of the dole office ‘sniffers’ become the enemy.
Licking their wounds from the disaster of a get rich quick job a year ago, Chrissie, Loggo, Yosser, George, Dixie and Dixie’s son Kevin’s lives collapse like the wall on the dodgy building site that kills old George’s political firebrand son Snowy. Beyond ideology, the survivors are felled by a kind of collective emasculation.
While Graham’s script remains faithful to Bleasdale’s original, Kate Wasserberg’s production steps out of its naturalistic roots with a series of theatrical flourishes. At the play’s start, archive footage of Thatcher and the police in battle during the 1981 Liverpool riots is beamed onto the back wall of Amy Jane Cook’s urban wasteland set of corrugated iron and managed decline. These images echo back later when Yosser is brutalised by police in a choreographed slow motion assault that sees Dyfan Jones’ jaunty conveyor belt score move into more elegiac territory.
While Jay Johnson’s Yosser is a broken mess in full mental collapse who provides the play’s heart, the scenes between George Caple as Chrissie and Amber Blease as his wife Angie are just as heartbreaking. It is nice too to see Jurrell Carter’s Loggo given a bit more to do than in the TV version.
If at times it feels like a series of greatest hits set pieces awaiting assorted punchlines, where each of the five episodes of the TV series showcased one of the Boys, Graham cuts up the experiences of each character so their lives overlap. This helps show off the concerted attack on an entire class and community, however isolated each man may be as individuals. It also points up the solution each finds to survive, be it getting on their metaphorical bike and leaving town or else sticking around, however bad it gets.
Graham’s play was first seen on home turf at Liverpool’s Royal Court Theatre in a co-production with the National Theatre of Great Britain, and is now revived for a UK tour by the Liverpool sired Bill Kenwright Limited. While it doesn’t matter if you haven’t seen the TV series to get the power of Graham’s play, you should nevertheless seek it out once you’ve left the theatre. Boys from the Blackstuff remains a vital totem of its time, but it burns with an anger beyond.
The Herald, March 13th 2025
ends
Comments