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(This review originally appeared in Wales Arts Review)
If you believe the programme note for this 1964 musical,
currently enjoying its first London revival in half a century, its co-author,
Alun Owen ‘was born in Liverpool’. No,
he bloody wasn’t. Although Owen was
undoubtedly a Scouse writer, he was born in Menai Bridge in 1925, and lived in
Wales until he was eight. Owen was part
of that distinctive group, the Liverpool Welsh, an example of what we might, on
the model of the Irish ‘Paddyaspora’, refer to as the Taffyaspora. Owen’s Liverpool writings often include Welsh
characters, from his first play Progress
to the Park (1959) to the irascible television
director played by Victor Spinetti in A
Hard Day’s Night (1964), probably his best-remembered work.
Maggie May is set
in Liverpool’s docks, and tells the story of a Lime Street prostitute, here
sentimentalised as a romantic who went on the game after being left by her true
love, Joe Casey, the son of a pre-war trade union firebrand. When Joe returns, to start work on the docks,
she considers ‘reclaiming my amateur status’, at the same time as he leads a
strike against the bosses, represented by the corrupt trade union leader Willie
Morgan. The political plot climaxes with
a Julius Caesar-like battle of
speeches between the Irish Casey and North Walian Morgan, a clash of the titans
between blarney and hwyl.
Songs are by the equally diasporic (Jewish, East End) Lionel
Bart, written during the period when he was trying to find a follow-up to his
biggest hit, Oliver! (1959). The show originally ran for a respectable,
but not stunning, 501 performances, in between the WW2 -set Blitz! (1962) and the notorious Robin Hood-themed flop Twang!! (1965) - notice the increasing desperation indicated
by the inflation of exclamation marks According
to a programme note from the original production, Bart brought the project to Owen,
who had to teach him the Liverpool dialect
– ‘part Irish, part Welsh, and part catarrh’, and the script’s decorated with flashes
of Scouse wit – ‘Who knitted your face and dropped a stitch?’. The musical style mixes jazz, folk songs – we
get snatches of both the titular sailors’ ballad (familiar to Beatles fans from
the cleaned-up version on Let It Be)
and ‘Leave her Johnny, leave her’ - Brecht/Weill cabaret, and a little rock ‘n’
roll. The small-scale musical
arrangement here doesn’t always serve the style – solo piano isn’t the best
accompaniment for folk and jazz; I found myself wanting the roughness of guitar
and tea chest bass.
And, in the end, that’s the problem. Maggie
May was an example of the British verismo
musical - shows featuring working-class, usually female, characters, and
vernacular musical styles – folk, music hall, ballads. Bart himself helped to invent the style with Fings Ain’t What They Used T’Be (1959), writing songs to the script by the Barnardo
Boy and occasional jailbird Frank Norman.
Verismo was the product of a
very specific movement in British history – the post war flourishing of
working-class cultures that had birthed both kitchen-sink theatre and the folk
music revival. Now, at a time when
British culture (and theatre in particular) is increasingly patrician, it’s
hard to recapture that moment, the salt is missing. The cast biographies for this production show
a lot of West End experience – Kara Lily Hayworth, who plays Maggie, was in the
national tour of Cilla – the Musical,
and her performance has something of that performer’s wide-eyed charm - but
there are few people here who are convincing as either prostitutes or
dockers. In the end, this makes the
drama hard to care about – to put it at its most basic, the story of a tart who
regains her heart doesn’t work if you never believed in her profession in the
first place.
Matthew Iliffe’s production does its best, with choreographer
Sam Spencer-Lane providing impressively full-blooded dance routines in the
Finborough’s intimate space, but the direction shows little sense of dramatic
pacing – Maggie’s revelation of her profession to Joe and the offstage death of
a docker, the event that prompts the strike, are both sailed past without any
sense of weight. At times, the
production goes out of its way to avoid any kind of hard edge – when Maggie
tells an impecunious punter to ‘’come back when you’re working and lopsided
with pound notes’, the line is delivered with an affectionate stroke of the
cheek. This is an efficient, glossy
revival, but Bart’s score, and Owen’s script, leave you wishing for a
production with a few more streaks in its mascara, and a little more dirt under
its nails.
David
Cottis
(Maggie May runs
at the Finborough theatre until April 20)
