Boys From The Blackstuff – Theatre Reviews [Updated]

"A tremendously powerful study in tragic masculinity" (National Theatre London)

"‘Boys from the Blackstuff’ does not feel like a James Graham play. It feels an awful lot like Bleasdale’s landmark 1982 TV drama – even if the execution of the story is often relatively different, the same plot but chopped up, reformatted, at times made a splash more PC. Certainly it’s testimony to Graham’s skill at keeping multiple narrative balls in the air."

"Graham’s adaptation can’t quite escape the fact that he’s adapting an anthology-style TV series that didn’t have a single storyline running throughout its whole length. Kate Wasserberg’s transferring Liverpool Royal Court production doesn’t really try any fancy tricks - one bit of dramatic harness work aside, it’s stripped back, with a rugged and no-frills industrial-style set from Amy Jane Cook."

" A blast from the past, which still echoes today: flawed but stirring" (National Theatre London)

"While Blackstuff has his customary, vigorous blend of hard politics and demotic entertainment, it’s not his subtlest work. The piece necessarily centres a brusque working-class masculinity, there’s little tonal variation and quite a lot of meaningful underlining."

"Wasserberg keeps the action brisk though, and the acting is full-throated and vivid. Designer Amy Jane Cook gives us two looming cranes framing a screen where Liverpool’s dark skies, docks and two cathedrals swim into being. This is a blast from the past which still echoes today: flawed but stirring."

"Punchy and humane" (National Theatre London)

"Transformed into a funny, punchy, humane two-act play by our leading political playwright, James Graham, it comes roaring across the footlights to speak to a society still affected by the stark shifts of the 1980s and struggling with its own cost of living crisis, precarious employment, crumbling public services and a profound lack of faith in institutions. Some specifics may have changed; the human cost has not."

"Graham’s version makes plain how this is a story about mental health and male identity as much as economics and politics."

"Barry Sloane is superb, making the role his own."

"Sometimes the narrative feels unclear and bittier than it might have if Graham had written a stage drama from scratch"

"The emotional punch is the same as it was 40 years ago" (National Theatre London)

"James Graham is burdened by the need to preserve this classic piece of writing ... but the show comes alive when it finds the raw edges of poverty and desperation"

"Graham’s mashing of the show’s discrete storylines into one play feels lumpy. The first half takes a while to get out of montage mode, only settling just before the interval. Then when we come back it’s all denouement: every scene feels like the penultimate scene. The strength of Bleasdale’s material is a blessing and a curse. Graham feels the need to preserve it, but that stops the play becoming something that coheres in its own right."

"The good moments are really, really good – and usually they involve Barry Sloane’s Yosser Hughes, half-man half-moustache, the character who came to symbolise mass unemployment in the Eighties."

"Graham nails it, not on the structural level but in its guts. The emotional punch is the same as it was 40 years ago: no missing the fact that this is about pride, hope, hard work – and the ripping away of those things by Thatcher’s government."

"Fine performances but much of the detail is lost" (National Theatre London)

"There are flickers of Scouse humour, accompanied by the occasional earnest sea shanty. But in the end, Graham and the director Kate Wasserberg haven’t quite solved the problem of how to squeeze a five-part saga into a single piece. Much of the detail is lost in a blur of scene-setting."

"Moments that stir to anger or grief" (National Theatre London)

"James Graham’s adaptation of the seminal Alan Bleasdale TV drama is timely, but doesn’t hit hard enough"

"Child poverty and food banks have become part of our social landscape; yet the trail of gunpowder that should connect Bleasdale’s unemployed working-class Liverpudlians struggling to survive Thatcher’s Britain with today’s crises is never properly ignited by Graham’s writing or Kate Wasserberg’s production. The staging feels diffuse, the overlapping stories failing to cohere or acquire momentum. But although it doesn’t hit us hard enough where it hurts, there are still moments that stir to anger or grief, along with a rich seam of dark, salty humour and defiant resilience.""

"It’s all intelligent, and powerful, and true – and it deserves a more dramatically forceful delivery. Still, there could hardly be a better time for a reminder, if one were needed, of the importance of social conscience, and of seizing opportunities for change."

"Fans of the TV show will love this resonant update" (Royal Court Theatre Liverpool)

"There is enough of Alan Bleasdale’s Bafta-winning series in this stage adaptation to keep its fans happy"

"Kate Wasserberg’s production.. is more of a period piece, though happily without being pastiche."

"Barry Sloane is simultaneously charismatic and menacing as Yosser, bubbling with frustration and always about to unleash a headbutt, and is supported by fine performances from the rest of the Boys."

"Lauren O’Neil as Angie, meanwhile, reminds us of the female experience behind the menfolk’s shanties and talk of laid-off dockers. She’s a 28-year-old wife and a mother for 10 years already, she screams at husband Chrissie (Nathan McMullen). She has no food in her cupboards and has had no life. This scene, made famous originally by Julie Walters, is more red meat for fans of the series. But O’Neil, like the rest of the cast, does an admirable job of referencing her forebears yet making the part her own."

"Amy Jane Cook’s industrial set captures the docks of Thatcher’s Merseyside, while smart use of projected images adds a modern sensibility and allows the stage to transform instantly into Liverpool landmarks including both cathedrals. Slow-motion fight scenes bring a fleeting air, almost, of contemporary dance amid the 80s tragicomedy."

"..this Blackstuff remains, like its predecessor, a show about the human consequences, rather than the causes, of economic failure. The question it asks is how will we all react to those consequences."

"Ambitious and timely" (Royal Court Theatre Liverpool)

"Heartfelt performances power James Graham’s galvanising stage version of Alan Bleasdale’s acclaimed anthology series"

"There’s plenty of overlap between the crumbling, recession-struck Liverpool of the play and the worsening conditions across the UK during our current economic crisis. The story is gutting and galling by turns but, however bleak things get, Wasserberg keeps the tone light. Humour emerges both from the characters’ pally banter and from their bewilderment at the unfair social system in which they are trapped."

"Barry Sloane gives a frantic, ferocious performance as the febrile Yosser Hughes, thrown into a spiral of hopelessness after losing his job, his wife and – by his own narrow definition – his identity as a man."

"Yosser Hughes returns in an adaptation that had Merseyside on its feet" (Royal Court Theatre Liverpool)

"This long-awaited stage production of Alan Bleasdale’s near-legendary TV series does not disappoint"

"There is no question of director Kate Wasserberg’s staging (produced by Liverpool’s Royal Court in association with Stockroom Productions Ltd) simply relying on Blackstuff’s near-legendary status on Merseyside. Graham has crafted aspects of Bleasdale’s work into a brilliantly honed two-and-a-half hours of theatre."

"The script captures the bleak humour of Bleasdale’s series (especially in the dark farce of Angie talking to friends and neighbours through the letterbox for fear of being spotted by the “sniffers” from the Social Security fraud department). Designer Amy Jane Cook honours the writing with a visually impressive, improbably versatile dockyard set."

"Meanwhile the music, live song, choreography and projected imagery help to generate the necessary atmosphere of tension, fear and instinctive human solidarity."

"Blistering Liverpool stage adaptation of the landmark TV series" (Royal Court Theatre Liverpool)

"It begins in free fall. Human and economic. A man tumbles to the ground as documentary footage details the plummeting employment rates that gripped 1980s Liverpool in a vicious stranglehold. Kate Wasserberg’s production could end there — its metaphor clear and potent — but ensures over the next two hours that it hits us as squarely between the eyes as one of Yosser’s signature headbutts"

"The cast perfectly capture the significance of the title: these are men reduced to boys, their joblessness stripping them of purpose and masculinity in a society that expects them to be breadwinners."

"The production lays bare the deception of Thatcherism, promoting uninhibited self-growth achieved through jobs that were acutely scarce."

"it feels less concentrated than Graham’s usually tightly focused, compact and sharply plotted dramas. But he shows the human cost of sweeping political change with blistering force. He’s taken this city’s story of communities broken by hardship, relit its embers and returned it to them, mended."

"Powerful portrayals of working-class pride" (Royal Court Theatre Liverpool)

"James Graham’s funny and violent TV adaptation belies a sensitive study of male mental health, as right-wing economics hits a group of road layers’ lives"

"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."

"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."

"biting Scouse wit brings a tender tribute to life" (Royal Court Theatre Liverpool)

"How do you take one of the great TV series of the past 50 years and make it feel both familiar and new on stage? James Graham’s filleting of six hours of television is as adroit as you would expect from the writer of Dear England, Ink, This House, Quiz and Sherwood. Graham trims, tweaks, restructures, adds flourishes of his own."

"In summoning up the dismal spirit in Liverpool in the first flush of Thatcherism, he marshals the resources of Alan Bleasdale’s vivid, angry, sympathetic, blackly comical 1982 original (plus a flashback to the 1980 Play for Today that preceded it) with skill and wit."

"Yet in Kate Wasserberg’s production for Liverpool’s Royal Court and Stockroom Productions, it’s hard ever to forget entirely that that is what he is doing. It’s efficient, it’s streaked with outspoken Scouse wit, but it rarely leaps out of the stage at you."

"Not the fault of the fine cast, who expertly tread that fine line between doing their own thing and recalling the originals."

"Alan Bleasdale’s 80s TV classic about jobless workers hits home in James Graham’s adaptation" (Royal Court Theatre Liverpool)

"The story is both specific and far-reaching. Amy Jane Cook’s big, exhilarating design gives the action a pulse. Scarlet girders and scaffolding reach across the stage; the videos of Jamie Jenkin (who started at the Court in the box office) offer a glimmer of the Mersey and a glimpse of the city’s two cathedrals, Anglican and Catholic, descending like bell jars. Irony twists throughout."

"The divisions, the tornness, the waste of talent are shrewdly captured by Nathan McMullen’s Chrissie – fighting against the temptation to betray. It is he, not Yosser, who is the play’s guiding figure. But Bernard Hill made Yosser Hughes unforgettable, so it is wonderful that Barry Sloane re-embodies him in all his magnetic fury"

"Heartbreaking Boys from the Blackstuff shakes Royal Court audience to its core" (Royal Court Theatre Liverpool)

"Adapting a masterpiece is an unenviable task..... Now, James Graham has brought the series to the stage in devastating fashion."

"In short, it is phenomenal. Superbly acted, incredibly powerful while being equally heartbreaking and hilarious, this is theatre at its very, very best."