The pre-show announcement about turning off mobile phones and not taking photographs, barely audible over a lively and expectant press night audience, added, "we've waited forty years for this; it would be a shame to spoil it." And where better to finally bring to the stage a work by one of Liverpool's most celebrated political dramatists that coined a catchphrase that everyone in the country was repeating during the '80s—"Gi's a job!"—than the theatre that is currently the one most devoted to Liverpool writers and plays for and about the people of Liverpool.
Bleasdale's series was set in Liverpool in 1982 in the midst of Thatcherism amongst a group of men who worked as road builders, laying the 'blackstuff', but now there is no work to be had anywhere in the city and so they have to try to feed their families on the little they get from the dole. However, this was a country in which the most vulnerable were demonised, even criminalised, by the government, with the assistance of the popular press, rather than those in power being held to account (sound familiar?), so 'the social' are constantly checking up on them, even covertly following them, to make sure they aren't working while drawing dole. If they're suspected, their benefits are stopped while they are investigated.
But of course they are working, if they can get anything, as employers like Molloy, capitalising on their desperation, are prepared to pay cash-in-hand for building work if everything is kept off the books, while Chrissie Todd's wife Angie (Lauren O'Neil) is pushing leaflets through doors for a pound a week, until she is told that the social are watching her house. Dixie Dean gets a job as nightwatchman at the docks, but isn't being paid enough to fight off the gang of thieves who pay for his silence with a pair of boots. And when Donald Moss from the DOE (Oliver Mawdsley) arranges a raid on Molloy's site, their father figure George Malone's son, Snowy (George Caple), ends up dead.
The TV series focussed on different sets of characters in different episodes. James Graham has integrated the stories more but has not tried to shape them into a single narrative, though of course a lot has been lost in transferring five hours of screen time into less than half of that on stage. The story of what happened in Middlesborough is told more than shown, which means it has less impact than the build-up promises, but the scene when Chrissie and Angie's bitterness finally comes to a head, which gets a full episode in the series, is just as heart-rending in a quarter of that time, and still finishes—literally with a bang—with equal parts hope and despair.
Director Kate Wasserberg has a very strong cast of ten, five each playing one of the 'boys' and the other five in multiple roles. Andrew Schofield, who was a young thug in Bleasdale's GBH in 1991, here is the old man, George, to whom all the others go with their troubles, and he plays it beautifully. Nathan McMullen is Chrissie, who is seen by some as too 'nice' and principled to survive, Mark Womack is Dixie and Aron Julius is Loggo Logmond.
But the most memorable character of the TV series was Yosser Hughes, a man at the end of his tether after he lost his wife, his job and his life savings and who is always on the edge of erupting into violence. Barry Sloane doesn't stray far from Bernard Hill's original portrayal, nor should he, but he still makes him utterly convincing. The main departure from the TV series is over his kids, whom he seems to have with him all the time, even on site and in the dole office, but this new twist, revealed right at the end, makes his situation even more heartbreaking.
Even compacted into a night at the theatre, these are still very well-drawn, believable characters in a script full of wit and observations that still resonate (some got a round of applause on press night). All of the main character have endings that are, at best, bitter-sweet, but they are all left with a note of hope—for their relationships with one another, if not for what the state can offer them.
It may have been forty years since the TV series, but it has been worth the wait, and it is best experienced here in the midst of a Liverpool audience.