By Aline Mahrud

WORTH A LOOK?: ****

WHEN?: Saturday 25 May 2024, runs through 8 June and then onto the Garrick Theatre 13 June through 3 August 2024 Tickets RUNTIME: 150 minutes (including a 20-minute interval)

Songs including Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick by Ian Dury, Depeche Mode’s New Life and Love Will Tear Us Apart by Joy Division play before curtain up to set the scene as the UK in 1982 or thereabouts.

• Read on for reasons including how this is an adaptation that is always sensitive to the elements that made the original so human with a real sense of place and time

Boys From The Bluckstuff was originally a 5-part drama aired on BBC2 in 1982 by Liverpudlian playwright Alan Bleasdale about the effect of unemployment on a city whose dockyards were in decline as national government lurched to the right. It’s re-shown on BBC4 on Wednesday (29 May 2024).

It focused on the lives of 5 working class tarmac layers who lost their jobs after 4 of them went it alone and invested their savings in a sub-contracting job in Middlesborough that turned out to be a scam.

Transferring from Liverpool’s Royal Court, this James Graham (Olivier Award-winner Dear England, Prince Edward Theatre) adaptation of the TV series about unemployment in 80s Liverpool plays for a limited run at the National’s Olivier Theatre for 21 performances before a West End transfer.

We were 12 years old when the original series aired and can remember elements of it particularly the character Yosser Hughes, played then by the recently deceased Bernard Hill and now by the terrifying Barry Sloane, whose ‘Gi’ssa job’ catchphrase became known widely.

Directed by Kate Wasserburg, it was actually the 2 lead women who play multiple roles that we actually felt most moved by. Played by Julie Walters (One Voice, Old Vic) in the original, Lauren O’Neil is unforgettable as Chrissie’s wife Angie who despairs at her husband’s stoicism as the family simply doesn’t have enough money to eat, a storyline likely to resonate in a cost of living crisis.

Helen Carter’s role at the Department of Employment sending ‘sniffers’ to root out those illegally claiming dole while working is almost Kafka-esque in its pointlessness and clearly influences The League Of Gentlemen.

But it’s also Yosser’s declining mental health skewered uncomfortably by a female student early on that will linger longest in the memory as also the tragedy of plasterer Snowy Malone, a socialist who simply loves his work.

The combination of the dole office interrogation scenes into a Usual Suspects-style montage with numbers feels like a James Graham invention but this is an adaptation that is always sensitive to the elements that made the original so human with a real sense of place and time.

Margaret Thatcher appears briefly on video footage on the screen at the back of the stage and, with the call of a snap election, this might be as political as theatre gets as the UK prepares to head to the polls.

We see the New York dock-set A View From The Bridge at the Theatre Royal Haymarket immediately before this and we’re struck by the similarities between the 2 about people being denied the basic right to work and the tragic consequences this inevitably brings.

• Main pictures by AB Photography via Facebook courtesy National Theatre Tickets
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