Review: BOYS FROM THE BLACKSTUFF, Theatre Royal Windsor - Tour

Photo credit: Alastair Muir

When you see a play promoted based on Alan Bleasdale’s wonderful 1982 five-part TV series, Boys from the Blackstuff, adapted for the stage by James Graham, recently acclaimed as Number 1 in the Stage 100, you are entitled to expect a first-class script. The play started at Liverpool’s Royal Court and then went on to the National Theatre and the Garrick in 2024 . Bill Kenwright’s production company is now taking it out on a UK tour through to July starting at Theatre Royal Windsor with a first class cast and an evocative setting that brings the powerful emotional story to life wonderfully.

The context of Thatcher’s early years with a deepening recession and the 1981 Toxteth riots opens the play, which is set in 1980’s Liverpool with its docks declining as the containerised trade moves to more southern ports that face towards Europe rather than America, leaving the city with massive unemployment. The TV series is remembered for the character Yosser and his desperate catchphrase of “Gizza Job, Go on, Gizzit. I can do that” but the play reminds us that this is a story of five men . Dixie Dean, the foreman played by Mark Womack; Loggo, the second-generation immigrant played by Jurell Carter; Chrissie, played by George Caple whose marriage is under pressure; and the elderly George Malone played by Ged McKenna. Yosser, played with an impressive physicality by Jay Johnson, is disturbed and delusional and has become an outsider to the others by his behaviour following an incident on a Middlesborough job a year before, which hangs over the five as a ghost of Christmas past.

The play explores the impact on the men’s lives and families as they seek official work through the Department of Employment while working for cash in hand for Mr Malloy and being pursued by the “sniffers” who seek to catch them. When a raid to catch them red handed goes wrong and Malone’s son is killed, the tension and emotion in the relationships rises as they seek a way out.

This is a fast-paced show, cleverly staged by Amy Jane Cook with evocative black and white projections on the back wall and the cranes and corrugated iron of the dock settings with the simplest of furnishings to suggest other locations. The use of sea shanties and folk songs and some wonderfully choreographed scene setting movement adds to the sense of a community affected by the economic decline. There is violence with Yosser’s answer to any challenge being a head butt but is well staged and the production demonstrates Graham’s mastery of the theatrical form.

There are so many beautifully written scenes that expose the desperation and test the resolve of the men and their families, drawing the audience in emotionally and intellectually into their plight. There is comedy as Yosser first visits the Catholic cathedral and then the protestant one at either end of Hope Street in Liverpool. A wonderful combination of comedy and pathos as Dixie’s wife, Jean, finds herself trapped between people at the front and back door. There is respect and camaraderie as the men turn to ailing George for advice and assurance. The emotions are raw and moving as Chrissie and his wife Angie fight over putting principal before needs. And then there is the final exquisitely lit meeting of Yosser with Chrissie and Dixie. Each scene is a powerful exploration of the impact that unemployment and desperation for cash has on the families and friendships and it is rare that a play should deliver so many such impactful moments. Not only that but each storyline (they were individual character stores in the original episodes) is woven together with a wonderful supporting cast to make a perfect play for today.

Although this story is routed in the Eighties, a time of great industrial change and upwardly mobile people that left a very poor desperate underclass in some parts of the country, the story still resonates today. With the prospect of rising unemployment and immigration and slow or no growth hanging over the economy, the difference between the haves and have nots feels just as significant today. James Graham’s writing humanises these members of society left behind, draws attention to the factors that hold them back and calls for all of us to help provide hope and support, just as old George does, to navigate them through to a better life.

You can catch this marvellous piece of theatre on tour around the UK until July at twenty venues including Richmond, Bromley, Bath, Guildford, Brighton and Canterbury. We urge you to see it.

***** Five stars

Reviewed by: Nick Wayne

Boys from the Blackstuff plays at Theatre Royal Windsor until 8 February before continuing its tour. To book tickets for select touring venues, please click here.