Review: TWO OF US, HOME Manchester
Photo credit: Ross Kernahan
Written and produced by The Northern Players Company’s Barry Sloane and Richard Short, Two of Us is a stage adaptation of Mark Stanfield’s screenplay of the same name, showing an interpretation of how the final ever meeting between music icons John Lennon and Paul McCartney might’ve gone.
A story of two working class boys who loved each other, the events of the play take place in 1976 (six years since legendary music group The Beatles had broken up) in Lennon’s New York City apartment. After a long time of the pair being apart, McCartney makes an unannounced visit to his former band mate and friend. They discuss their individual and joint past, present and future now that both men are living very different lives; John had chosen to be a stay-at-home dad for his baby son, Sean, and Paul was topping charts globally with his new band, Wings, and about to head out on a world tour.
Co-writer and producer of the show Barry Sloane plays the role of John Lennon and he is joined onstage by Jay Johnson as Paul McCartney. Both actors brilliantly capture the personalities of the Liverpudlian musicians and have great chemistry through moments of joy being reunited and reminiscing about the good days, as well as moments when the two old friends bicker and argue and show the rift in their relationship, unravelling some of the reasons behind why The Beatles broke up.
Directed by Scot Williams, the scenes make great use of the space around the swanky New York apartment (designed by Amy Jane Cook) and during one scene, the actors step out onto a strip of staging in front of a curtain as Lennon and McCartney venture out onto the rooftop of the apartment building. The combination of Cook’s design, Katy Morrison’s lighting design, and Adrienne Quartly’s sound design really bring the city of New York to life with the cityscape through the windows, with lighting used to colour the skyline which changes to demonstrate the passing of time as McCartney spent a long while visiting his old friend, and the ambience of the street below being continuous but changing in quality depending on whether the functioning window of the set is open or not. Whilst it does add to the performance, the window also distracts the audience as it doesn’t appear to close properly, and Sloane seems to repeatedly try and correct this throughout scenes, which only draws more attention to the malfunction, making a bigger deal out of something so small.
At the top of the play, there are two projections, one of each character being interviewed, with the audio/visual work designed by DMLK Video. The first projection is what appears to be a video of a television interview is with Johnson as Paul McCartney, which is then followed by a projection of a photo of Sloane as John Lennon, but also has the voiceover of an interview. It is unclear as to why the team opted to have one projected interview done as a video and the other as just a still image with a voiceover; perhaps opting for the same type of medium for both interviews would have made it feel a little more cohesive.
An intriguing interpretation into what may have occurred in one final encounter between former members of The Beatles, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Two of Us is a well written play with a relaxed pace that allows audiences to really settle in and get cosy with two titans of the music industry and really delve deep into the ins and outs of their lives and their relationship with each other, as well as exploring the themes of masculinity and male friendships.
**** Four stars
Reviewed by: Jess Dalloway
Two of Us plays at HOME Manchester until 28 September, with further info here.