The false prosecutions and persecutions of 900 subpostmasters by the Post Office and the state has moved from a story publicly ignored for 20 years – despite the heroics of some journalists and politicians – to a landmark national scandal, following the impact of ITV’s Mr Bates vs the Post Office in January.
This both blesses and curses subsequent retellings, such as this summer’s Glitch by Rabble Theatre and now the Pentabus company’s Make Good. Interest in the subject matter is guaranteed but narrative tension largely absent. Pentabus’s innovation of retelling the events as a musical makes the delivery unfamiliar but the contents remain a much-read letter. In these dramas, the installation of the Horizon digital till resembles the villain’s entrance in a pantomime.
Dramatist Jeanie O’Hare cleverly addresses deja vu by focusing on less-known aspects of the storyline, including fascinating procedural detail about how pensions, the main business of the targeted branches, were issued. A particularly lethal detail is that weekly accounts had to be balanced on a Wednesday night and pensions were paid next morning. So any subpostmaster who remained closed while trying to unpick Horizon’s sums risked lines of their community’s most vulnerable outside the suddenly shut door.
As for the score, Stephen Sondheim argued that both the subject matter and each song of a musical must be subjected to the question: why is this being sung? In a piece to which this show feels indebted – Alecky Blythe’s and Adam Cork’s London Road, about serial killings in Ipswich – the lyrics were, innovatively, verbatim interviews. Jim Fortune’s compositions for Make Good, though, do not advance the action but comment on it (a Sondheim sin), and the most appealing – the morale raising You Are Not Alone!, and This Is Age!, an audience participation geriatric anthem – could easily fit other shows. Musically, this material might best suit an opera with gothic arias for Paula Vennells, ex Post Office CEO and former priest.
There are signs of a work still in progress: the press night performance ran 40 minutes longer than advertised and a rambling preamble could be cut. But this British disgrace grips and appals in any form: the second half was underscored by audience sobbing. And actors Victoria Brazier, Charlotte Delima, Ed Gaughan and Samuel Gosrani, parcelling out dozens of roles between them, give first-class service.
