Morally repugnant: Boys From the Blackstuff, at the Garrick Theatre, reviewed

Yosser Hughes is regarded as a national treasure. He first appeared in 1982 in Alan Bleasdale’s TV drama, Boys from the Blackstuff, which followed a crew of Liverpool workers who lay tarmac (‘black stuff’) for a living. When their contract expires the lads are left shocked and helpless even though job security is not a perk of their profession. The atmosphere of the show, adapted by James Graham, may come as a surprise to those who know Yosser by reputation only.

Far from being a worker’s champion, Yosser is a crook, a hypocrite and a class-traitor. He and his friends moonlight for cash while claiming state benefits, which are, of course, levied on the wages of honest workers. And they pilfer from Liverpool docks which increases the prices paid by customers who aren’t cheats. There are few scams they won’t stoop to. They expect to be coddled by the state from the cradle to the grave and yet they feign outrage when investigators accuse them, quite correctly, of fraud.

Yosser himself is a mountain of self-pity and aggression. His opening line is delivered to a girl at the Job Centre: ‘Sort me soddin’  Giro [payment] before I knock you into the disability office.’ Not exactly gallant repartee. Yosser is useless at everything except fathering kids and headbutting people in the face if their attitude displeases him. He mimics the conduct of a pre-revolutionary French aristocrat, leeching off the toil of others and squealing like a kitten if his privileges are curtailed. He and his pals are so precious that when one of them gets a nosebleed they call an ambulance. Who summons a team of paramedics to deal with a tiny trickle of blood?

Yosser is also a menace to the public. While searching for work, he galumphs around Liverpool like a Minotaur bellowing his catchphrase, ‘gissa job’, at random strangers. He has plenty of energy and time to spare, so why doesn’t he start a business? Well, he does. And he’s promptly swindled by a rival gang whose criminal instincts are fractionally sharper than his. Having failed once, he gives up forever; such is his supine and immature nature.

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Barry Sloane (Yosser) has a lot of verve and swagger but he happens to be the largest man on stage so whenever he smacks another character on the nose he seems cowardly rather than heroic. Every detail of this visually depressing and morally repugnant show is calculated to immiserate the audience. Placing Yosser on a pedestal was obviously an error. Anyone who recalls 1982 knows that a man like Yosser, living off state benefits in a prosperous democracy, enjoyed a level of comfort that would have been envied by the billions stranded in the dictatorships of Asia, Africa and Latin America. What Yosser lacks is not wealth but historical perspective and intellectual curiosity. All his woes are illusory and all his tribulations are self-inflicted. He believes every malign falsehood presented to him by his diseased imagination. Yosser is proof that the surest way to make a man angry and resentful is to give him everything.

Here’s Marilyn again. She’s irrepressible. The latest attempt to conjure her unique and complicated character on stage is a forensic investigation written by Guy Masterson (who also directs) and by Vicki McKellar who plays a minor role. In fact the minor roles dominate this exhaustive seminar about the theory that Bobby Kennedy murdered the blonde bombshell. We hear a lot about Bobby and his brother Jack as well as Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford and Joe DiMaggio but we don’t see them on stage. Instead we meet various bit-players and hangers-on.

After Marilyn’s death, her apartment is visited by her therapist, her physician, her chambermaid and a handful of Hollywood has-beens. They sit around discussing the circumstances of her death and the debate descends into bitterness as they screech accusations at each other. The result is dramatically impenetrable.

The writers have spent so much time researching the details that they feel obliged to put every scrap of information on stage. And to make the show dramatic, they have given the characters the same paranoid and vituperative frame of mind. It’s a shouting-match that goes on for two hours and 30 minutes.

Marilyn appears in a series of flashbacks but she’s portrayed very unsympathetically as a clingy simpleton soaked in booze and incapable of looking after herself. And she’s a lesbian, it turns out, who discovered the mysteries of the female orgasm thanks to her sexual tutor, Marlene Dietrich. The show doesn’t explain why Bobby Kennedy visited Marilyn in person to carry out the murder rather than hiring proxies to do it for him.

Genevieve Gaunt gives a fine performance as a rather slender and youthful-looking Marilyn. The women’s costumes are wonderful and the wigs simply outstanding. Must have cost a fortune.