Pentabus and New Perspectives are two Midlands-based, rural touring theatre companies, Pentabus is based in Shropshire and New Perspectives is based in Nottingham. Both companies celebrate their fiftieth anniversary this year, and Make Good: The Post Office Scandal is a co-production between them.
There is something inherently dramatic about the story of small, village postmasters and postmistresses being accused of crimes they didn’t commit and fighting back. Lance Nielsen wrote a play about it in 2022, False Accounts, ITV turned it into a four-part TV drama, Mr Bates vs. The Post Office, and now we get the musical by Jeanie O’Hare (book) and Jim Fortune (music and lyrics).
Ed Gaughan acts as an MC and narrator; he does an audience warm-up routine at the start and then appears in various roles, including Alan Bates, the former postmaster who formed the Justice For Postmasters Alliance and led the appeal against the unsafe convictions of hundreds of sub-postmasters. Three other actors, Victoria Brazier, Charlotte Delima and Samuel Gosrani, play everyone else.
Even if you didn’t see Mr Bates vs. The Post Office on TV, you probably know the story. In 1999, the Post Office rolled out a new Fujitsu point-of-sale computer system called Horizon to Post Office branches across the country. The Post Office, and many of the subpostmasters and mistresses themselves, initially assumed the computer was infallible, so when discrepancies occurred, it was blamed on either operator error or fraud. When The Post Office realised that the software was faulty, they used every legal instrument available to them to suppress the story and to prosecute the innocent victims. Even this week, Alan Bates, now Sir Alan Bates, is still chasing the government for the compensation which is due.
Post Offices are the heart of village life, and Make Good does an excellent job in humanising the story. The show references W H Auden’s poem "Night Mail" to evoke a sense of rural England and the romance of sending and receiving physical post in the days before e-mail and social media.
We follow Elsie, Indira and Mohandas as their lives are destroyed by the lies and cover-up of The Post Office. The contractual obligations which ensnare them are unravelled clearly and surprisingly dramatically. Their contracts dated from pre-IT days when a paper audit trail would enable them to follow up and resolve any cash discrepancies. But the new automated system doesn’t leave an audit trail; you can print out a till roll but if the data is wrong in the system then it will be wrong on the printout as well. Each sub-postmaster has to reconcile their cash every Wednesday night before they can ‘roll over’ and continue trading on Thursday morning, pensions payout day. If the roll over is a few pounds out, then it’s easier to make up the shortfall out of your own pocket, but the errors keep mounting, and the deception—which is technically fraud—gets bigger.
The cast is excellent, and the staging is understated but effective. Neil Bettles’s choreography is integrated seamlessly into Elle While’s direction, Carla Goodman's realistic Post Office set serves the show well and Jenny Roxburgh’s lighting and Dan Balfour’s sound design are evocative and atmospheric.
Jim Fortune’s music has a simple, homespun feel to it. It is beautifully played on a variety of mostly acoustic instruments by two onstage musicians, Màth Roberts and Rowan Elliott, and the folkie musical setting is well suited to the rural subject matter and performance venues. This is a play with music rather than a musical, and there can be a tendency for the songs to pause the action rather than advance it, particularly in the first half. It works better in the second half, though, and "Shame", sung by Charlotte Delima, and "The Darkest Hour", sung by Samuel Gosrani, are particularly strong.
A highlight of the show is the appearance of a local choir. At the mac, it was the Birmingham Clarion Singers, but different choirs will perform at different stages in the tour. They sit in the audience throughout the performance, which adds to the sense of continuity between the story and the audience, and when they join the actors on stage, it is a genuine lump in the throat moment.
This is proper grassroots, community theatre telling stories about, to and with the participation of the audience it serves. Near the end, one of the characters says the Post Office runs on, "ingenuity, fortitude and trust". Regional theatre does too, and long may it continue to do so.