The emotional high point of Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff is the funeral of George Malone. The death of this retired Liverpool docker is powerful not only because he is the one uncomplicatedly good character in the 1982 series, a masterpiece of television drama, but because he is a figurehead of socialist values. In a drama about the debilitating effects of unemployment, George symbolises the time before right-wing economics laid waste to working-class pride.
Playwright James Graham rightly places the scene at the culmination of his powerful stage adaptation for the Royal Court and Stockroom. But he also does something clever with it. As the unemployed labourers congregate to remember George (an excellent Andrew Schofield), Graham overlays the liturgy of the Catholic funeral mass with the banal call-and-response questions of the dole office. Suddenly, the scriptures of church and state look as formulaic as each other.
It is as if the men have become imprisoned by language itself. Lives rendered meaningless by lack of work have been made doubly so by lack of words. When, immediately afterwards, Chrissie Todd (Nathan McMullen) gets a call for his “last judgment,” we don’t know of it is a meeting with the social security or something more spiritual.
Boldly staged by director Kate Wasserberg on a girder-strewn dockland set by Amy Jane Cook, Graham’s play lightly fills in the contextual details, reminding us this is the year after the Toxteth riots at a time of industrial decline. It also makes Liverpool itself a player, a self-mythologising city port defeated by geography as much as economics.
But Graham knows the genius of Bleasdale’s original is its implicit politics. These characters are flawed, sometimes hilariously, sometimes tragically, but whatever their weaknesses, they are responding to a situation not of their making. It is a view of the underdog not the overlord and Graham is faithful to Bleasdale’s blueprint, including its emphasis on the experience of men (spirited performances by Helen Carter and Lauren O’Neil notwithstanding).
The laughs and outbursts of violence mask a sensitive study of male mental health, be it the fragile and terrifying state of mind of Yosser Hughes (Barry Sloane) or the deteriorating domestic lives of his comrades. It adds to a richly enjoyable show, funny, incendiary and humane.
At Royal Court, Liverpool, until 28 October
