Theatre reviews: Boys From the Blackstuff | Chef

This touring production of Boys From The Blackstuff is a chilling reminder of the cruelty of a system that puts profit before people, writes Joyce McMillan

Boys From The Blackstuff, Theatre Royal, Glasgow ★★★★

Chef, Perth Theatre ★★★★

If Arthur Miller’s Death Of A Salesman - currently on tour in a powerful production starring David Hayman - delivers a sharp reminder of how cruelly post-war American capitalism could dispose of those no longer needed as workers, then Alan Bleasdale’s Boys From The Blackstuff - the iconic 1980s television series set in the jobless and cash-strapped Liverpool of the Thatcher era - surely offers a powerful British companion-piece to Miller’s great tragedy.

Bleasdale’s style is very different from Miller’s, of course. The television series was famous for the sharp, performative comedy of the banter among the characters, a team of five unemployed labourers who once worked together laying tarmac roads and driveways. They appear alongside their families, friends and enemies; and this last group includes the social security staff - “sniffers”, to the men - who snoop around checking that they are not working on the side.

In James Graham’s stage version of the story - seen briefly in Glasgow this week - the death of one of their friends on a building-site, during one of their cash-in-hand jobs, plunges all five into the hell of a close official investigation, with all benefits suspended.

Boys From the Blackstuff | Alastair Muir

What’s striking about this current touring version, though - directed by Kate Wasserberg for the Liverpool Royal Court and Bill Kenwright Productions - is how boldly it confronts the utter despair and seething rage that lies just below the surface of these men’s jokey chat. There’s no sentimentality here about resilience, or solidarity among those facing hard times.

The characters - led by the show’s most famous character Yosser Hughes, played here by a raging Jay Johnson, and a desperately poignant Ged McKenna as George Snow, the veteran trade unionist who can’t believe that there’s no hope left - may sing a song about being all together on the road; but in reality most of them are now far too desperate to bother with moral scruples, or old dreams of brotherhood that will not be betrayed.

All of this is brought to vivid and sometimes heartbreaking life on Amy Jane Cook’s dramatic post-industrial set, fiercely lit by Ian Scott, with louring video images by Jamie Jenkin. There’s plenty of chat today, in Britain and beyond, about those “left behind” by half a century of globalisation, and a neoliberal revolution that always put profit before people. Like Death Of A Salesman, though, this powerful working-class story comes as a chilling reminder that many of those most brutally impacted by those changes are long since dead; driven to self-destructive despair by the sheer cruelty of a system that told them they were worthless, until they began to believe it themselves.

Chef | Contributed

There’s plenty of rage, too, in Chef, Sabrina Mahfouz’s fierce 2014 monologue about a young and brilliant woman chef so haunted by the demons of her early life - an absent and abusive father, boyfriends who proved no better - that she ends up in prison after an act of violence that is barely named, but all too easy to imagine.

Now, as she speaks to us, she is in charge of the prison kitchen; but even here, the violence that shapes the lives of so many imprisoned women has tracked her down, and put the knives that gleam around her to the wrong kind of use.

In Ayr Gaiety’s elegant and compelling 70-minute touring version of the show, directed by Andre Agius, a superbly intense and driven Rebecca Benson prowls and struts around the stage, backed by Ellie Wintour’s fine metallic and blood-red set, and supported by BSL interpreter Yvonne Strain. And if the show’s tour has been brief, ending in Edinburgh and Cumbernauld this weekend, the sheer intensity of the audience response to Mahfouz’s writing and Benson’s performance suggests that we may not have seen the last of it.

Boys From The Blackstuff is at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow until 15 March, and on tour. Chef is at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 14 March, and Cumbernauld Theatre at Lanternhouse, 15 March.