LOOKING FOR BUDDY To 13 June.
Bolton/Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
LOOKING FOR BUDDY
by Alan Plater music by Alan Barnes.
Octagon Theatre Bolton To 25 April
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat 15, 25 April 2pm.
Audio-described 22 April.
BSL Signed 23 April.
TICKETS: 01204 520661.
www.octagonbolton.co.uk
then Live Theatre Newcastle-upon-Tyne 7 May-13 June 2009.
Tue-Sat 7.30pm Mat 16, 21 May, 13 June 2pm.
Audio-described 4 June (+Touch Tour 6.15pm).
BSL Signed 20 May.
Captioned 28 May.
TICKETS: 0191 232 1232.
www.live.org.uk
Runs 2hr One interval.
Review: Timothy Ramsden 11 April.
Ambling riffs on mean streets attack the big boys and girls.
Jazz aficionado, one-time architect and London-dwelling Tynesider Alan Plater has written a play where Raymond Chandler’s mean streets are alive in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, particularly the blue Note jazz club in Wallsend, with insults thrown in about southerners’ ideas for the North East.
It’s all neatly acted in Mark Babych’s production on Helen Goddard’s grey-and-white set, catching the feel of monochrome film. There’s a blonde dame, though she’s no villainess, who visits not a detective but under-utilised jazz-loving architect Phil (Tim Healy, comically phlegmatic). And clubowner Fat Jack (Nicholas Lumley, suavely menacing) is rather agreeably lean, mean and lowdown.
Plater deploys his not-quite-generic types in a comedy which needs a fair amount of sympathetic understanding. You don’t go for jazz? Like your stories straight and credible? Think pace and shape matter in a play? Stay in the bar.
But ambling, shambling even, through a kind of story, there’s a point to it all. Plater’s Tyneside streets are mean, not from lowlife, but from the high-handed. Regeneration’s the name of the game, and global capitalism; either the playwright has a rare prescience or there’s been rewriting along the way to fit credit crunch times.
In a line from Peter Flannery’s Our Friends in the North or Julia Darling’s Manifesto for a New City, Plater’s Newcastle has Phil’s sister as a lone Marxist and his friend Frank a redundant shipbuilder making gourmet sandwiches. Meanwhile, despite 200-years’ worth of the stuff underground, they’re bringing coals to Newcastle from overseas.
Reality begins to seem elusive as the Buddy Bolden record people seek, without any great conviction. For jazz-trumpeter Bolden, who died in 1931, was never recorded. What’s needed, according to this play, is regeneration built on people’s needs, not imposed in ignorance from outside corporations with friendly names and selfish motives.
It’s a one-sided argument, but it’s amiably presented, has some fine musical numbers (a witty pub-quiz number and a blues, for example) and it will doubtless seem funnier at Live Theatre, where the plans for Wallsend will have local resonance, and the Byker Grove Heritage Trail not seem like quite a nice idea for cyclists.
Phil: Tim Healy.
Ella: Jayne MacKenzie.
Frank: Phil Corbitt.
Bella: Jane Holman.
Zelda: Jacqueline Boatswain.
Fat Jack: Nicholas Lumley.
Director: Mark Babych.
Designer: Helen Goddard.
Lighting: Brent Lees.
Sound: Andy Smith.
Musical Director/Vocal Arrangements: Howard Gray.
Audio-visual designer: Joe Stathers-Tracey.
Choreographer: Nicola Bolton.
2009-04-12 13:59:32