REVIEW
✭✭✭✭✭ 5/5
Alan Bleasdale's
Boys from the Blackstuff
by James Graham
Mercury Theatre
Colchester
Wed 28 May 2025 - Sat 31 May 2025
✭✭✭✭✭ 5/5
Alan Bleasdale's
Boys from the Blackstuff
by James Graham
Mercury Theatre
Colchester
Wed 28 May 2025 - Sat 31 May 2025
A fascinating look at life in 80s Liverpool
It is Liverpool in the 80s, and Chrissie, Loggo, George, Dixie, and Yosser are desperately trying to find work. Proud men used to being the breadwinner for their families, they have the indignity of going to the Dept. of Employment every week to collect their ‘dole.’ There they are constantly told to find work, but none is available. They are then bullied, intimidated and spied on to check if they are secretly working cash in hand, to make ends meet.
Even the suggestion that their wife may have found a way to make pin money by cleaning or delivering leaflets merits a Sniffer, someone sneaking around investigating. Then a possible court case follows, whilst their dole money is suspended. It is a Catch 22 situation.
When they do find casual work, the building site manager takes advantage of them. They are paid below the minimum hourly rate and refused proper jobs. Even the decent Dixie (Mark Womack) who just wants to be clean, finds himself inveigled into turning a blind eye to stealing.
James Graham’s powerful new National Theatre adaptation of Alan Bleasdale’s BAFTA award-winning TV series presents how hard life must have been. All the industries were disappearing, the road mending had ended and the docks of Liverpool were standing idle. They are, ‘pointing the wrong way,’ as old George constantly reminisces, the trade used to be with America and now it is Europe. The container ships are at Felixstowe or Southampton on the other side of the country.
All the characters are well played with each actor bringing something of their own to the part. They are all decent men with their own story dragged down by life. . Chrissie (George Caple) plays the kindly, warm family man, with great pathos as he desperately tries to save his marriage. Yosser, is played as an aggressive, unlikeable character, who drags his invisible children around with him. As the play goes on, we begin to understand that he has lost his family and is rather a pathetic figure with mental health issues. Jay Johnson conveys this champion head butter brilliantly, as he desperately asks people to Gizza job. He insists that he can do any of their work from the milkman to the local vicar.
The set design by Amy Jane Cook is very dramatic with some integral scene changes that become part of the action. There is some clever choreography involving boxes, frames and sliding flats that create a building site, the Dept. of Employment, family living rooms and even a pub. The accident where Snowy (Reiss Barber) is killed escaping from the investigator/sniffer is dramatically staged, with an effective use of video projection designed by Jamie Jenkin.
The production utilises dramatic music, group singing, video backdrops and stylised scenes. The scene where Yosser is a victim of police brutality, choreographed in slow motion, is particularly effective.
Although these are sad times and the play depicts a community that has long gone, there is a lot of Scouse humour throughout. The audience had some laugh out loud moments. One hysterical scene had a woman trying to get rid of the ‘sniffer’ shouting through her front door letterbox, answering the phone, whilst shouting to a friend through the back door letterbox at the same time.
The 80s, to people who lived through it, doesn’t seem that long ago, but it is a surprise to realise it is over 40 years. To the young millennials of today, this play is virtually a period drama, as it has no relationship to life now. Those communities have disappeared. In fact, the pendulum has swung too far the other way with the benefit culture, and some people having no desire to work.
As a result, it would have been helpful for the audience to have some background information of that time via a programme. Apparently, there were none on offer, not even a cast list, which the National Theatre usually provides free in London.
The director Kate Wasserberg has made this sad story about the devastating impact of unemployment, a fascinating and interesting watch with lots of humour.
To anyone who wants to know what the blackstuff is, well, it is the tarmac on the roads where the lads used to work.
This is a thought provoking play and very well done.
Review Jacquee Storozynski-Toll
The production continues
Thurs 29 May 2025-
Sat 31 May 2025
7.30pm – Mat Thurs & Sat 2.30pm
Duration:
Approx. 2hrs 30 mins, incl. interval
Price:
£25.00 - £42.00
(inc. £2 ticket levy)
Age Guidance:
14+
Box Office: 01206 57394
The tour continues :-
20 – 24 May
NEWCASTLE Theatre Royal
28 – 31 May
COLCHESTER Mercury Theatre
3 – 7 Jun
DONCASTER Cast in Doncaster
10 – 14 Jun
STOKE-ON-TRENT Regent Theatre
17 – 21 Jun
BRIGHTON Theatre Royal
24 – 28 Jun
CANTERBURY Marlowe Theatre
1 – 5 Jul
MOLD Theatr Clwyd
Even the suggestion that their wife may have found a way to make pin money by cleaning or delivering leaflets merits a Sniffer, someone sneaking around investigating. Then a possible court case follows, whilst their dole money is suspended. It is a Catch 22 situation.
When they do find casual work, the building site manager takes advantage of them. They are paid below the minimum hourly rate and refused proper jobs. Even the decent Dixie (Mark Womack) who just wants to be clean, finds himself inveigled into turning a blind eye to stealing.
James Graham’s powerful new National Theatre adaptation of Alan Bleasdale’s BAFTA award-winning TV series presents how hard life must have been. All the industries were disappearing, the road mending had ended and the docks of Liverpool were standing idle. They are, ‘pointing the wrong way,’ as old George constantly reminisces, the trade used to be with America and now it is Europe. The container ships are at Felixstowe or Southampton on the other side of the country.
All the characters are well played with each actor bringing something of their own to the part. They are all decent men with their own story dragged down by life. . Chrissie (George Caple) plays the kindly, warm family man, with great pathos as he desperately tries to save his marriage. Yosser, is played as an aggressive, unlikeable character, who drags his invisible children around with him. As the play goes on, we begin to understand that he has lost his family and is rather a pathetic figure with mental health issues. Jay Johnson conveys this champion head butter brilliantly, as he desperately asks people to Gizza job. He insists that he can do any of their work from the milkman to the local vicar.
The set design by Amy Jane Cook is very dramatic with some integral scene changes that become part of the action. There is some clever choreography involving boxes, frames and sliding flats that create a building site, the Dept. of Employment, family living rooms and even a pub. The accident where Snowy (Reiss Barber) is killed escaping from the investigator/sniffer is dramatically staged, with an effective use of video projection designed by Jamie Jenkin.
The production utilises dramatic music, group singing, video backdrops and stylised scenes. The scene where Yosser is a victim of police brutality, choreographed in slow motion, is particularly effective.
Although these are sad times and the play depicts a community that has long gone, there is a lot of Scouse humour throughout. The audience had some laugh out loud moments. One hysterical scene had a woman trying to get rid of the ‘sniffer’ shouting through her front door letterbox, answering the phone, whilst shouting to a friend through the back door letterbox at the same time.
The 80s, to people who lived through it, doesn’t seem that long ago, but it is a surprise to realise it is over 40 years. To the young millennials of today, this play is virtually a period drama, as it has no relationship to life now. Those communities have disappeared. In fact, the pendulum has swung too far the other way with the benefit culture, and some people having no desire to work.
As a result, it would have been helpful for the audience to have some background information of that time via a programme. Apparently, there were none on offer, not even a cast list, which the National Theatre usually provides free in London.
The director Kate Wasserberg has made this sad story about the devastating impact of unemployment, a fascinating and interesting watch with lots of humour.
To anyone who wants to know what the blackstuff is, well, it is the tarmac on the roads where the lads used to work.
This is a thought provoking play and very well done.
Review Jacquee Storozynski-Toll
The production continues
Thurs 29 May 2025-
Sat 31 May 2025
7.30pm – Mat Thurs & Sat 2.30pm
Duration:
Approx. 2hrs 30 mins, incl. interval
Price:
£25.00 - £42.00
(inc. £2 ticket levy)
Age Guidance:
14+
Box Office: 01206 57394
The tour continues :-
20 – 24 May
NEWCASTLE Theatre Royal
28 – 31 May
COLCHESTER Mercury Theatre
3 – 7 Jun
DONCASTER Cast in Doncaster
10 – 14 Jun
STOKE-ON-TRENT Regent Theatre
17 – 21 Jun
BRIGHTON Theatre Royal
24 – 28 Jun
CANTERBURY Marlowe Theatre
1 – 5 Jul
MOLD Theatr Clwyd
Chrissie, Loggo, George, Dixie and Yosser are used to hard work and providing for their families. But there is no work and there is no money. What are they supposed to do? Work harder, work longer, buy cheaper, spend less? They just need a chance – and a job.
James Graham’s powerful new adaptation of Alan Bleasdale’s BAFTA award-winning TV series follows five men and their families in 80s Liverpool as they learn to live in a world where the old certainty of a job for life has been snatched away from them.
Packed with heart and humour, Boys from the Blackstuff is directed by Kate Wasserberg. This compelling and moving story of family and friendship comes to Colchester direct from a sell-out run at the National Theatre and a critically acclaimed run in the West End.
James Graham is one of the UKs most lauded contemporary playwrights (Dear England - NT) and TV screewriters (Sherwood) and the production of Boys From The Blackstuff received rave reviews when it premiered in Liverpool in 2023 and transferred to the National Theatre and from there to the West End last year. The original TV series, which tells the visceral and also very funny story of unemployed Liverpool roadworkers in the 1980s, is often cited as one of the most influential and powerful TV dramas of the past fifty years.
James Graham’s powerful new adaptation of Alan Bleasdale’s BAFTA award-winning TV series follows five men and their families in 80s Liverpool as they learn to live in a world where the old certainty of a job for life has been snatched away from them.
Packed with heart and humour, Boys from the Blackstuff is directed by Kate Wasserberg. This compelling and moving story of family and friendship comes to Colchester direct from a sell-out run at the National Theatre and a critically acclaimed run in the West End.
James Graham is one of the UKs most lauded contemporary playwrights (Dear England - NT) and TV screewriters (Sherwood) and the production of Boys From The Blackstuff received rave reviews when it premiered in Liverpool in 2023 and transferred to the National Theatre and from there to the West End last year. The original TV series, which tells the visceral and also very funny story of unemployed Liverpool roadworkers in the 1980s, is often cited as one of the most influential and powerful TV dramas of the past fifty years.