THEATRE REVIEW: Irvine Welsh's Blackpool

RUN any conventional measure of theatrical excellence over this new musical by Irvine Welsh and a cast of dozens, and it would probably fail on nine counts out of ten.

The show bears the mark of its diffuse, tentative origins all the way through, like the proverbial stick of rock. Its storytelling is vague to the point of confusion, its characters barely develop, its songs are wistful and rambling rather than catchy, and so far as pace is concerned, it often seems to drift off into a kind of limbo where nothing much is happening at all.

And yet somehow, behind and beyond all that, this show has a smell of the real and theatrical future about it that creates its own strange crackle of slow-burning excitement. For a start, there’s the boldness of moving straight to that "different planet" which many people now feel they inhabit on their nights out; a place of hazy memories, booze, the odd illegal drug, raunchy or dangerous sexual flirtations, a place of sustained, deliberate excess, founded on affluence and emptiness. Many shows since the 1980s have visited this planet; Blackpool actually inhabits it from start to finish, and Helen Clarkson’s terrific set - along the promenade, between the Gents and the Ladies - perfectly conveys that sense of a floating world of people in search of fun.

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Then there’s the odd burst of pure Irvine Welsh dialogue, funny, sharp, full of brilliant traces of the social changes that haunt this play. There are the strange little songs that - in Harry Gibson’s words - just "fall out of the characters’ mouths" as if the show somehow reflects the actual texture of modern street life, with little bursts of music leaking constantly from nowhere.

And finally, there’s the show-stopping quality of the acting, not always brilliant, but self-possessed, confident, at one with the material in a way that can lift the show instantly from apparent aimlessness into quiet, thrilling unison with the rhythm of life itself. There are moments, particularly around the opening of the second half, when Gibson really does need to move things on to prevent the audience falling into a coma. But, hey, on planet Blackpool there’s nothing wrong with a little coma. Getting unconscious is part of the fun, part of the dream; maybe something to do with what we’ve become, as one millennium slithers into the next.

Until 2 March

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