Hope Mill, a tiny venue with a big reputation and that has had a big impact on the region's theatrical landscape, hosted a star-studded press night for a new play from one of the North West's most famous playwrights, Jim Cartwright, featuring two extremely well-known local actors, Matthew Kelly and Denise Welch.
They play a pair of young friends from the north, Walter and Carol—not a couple; the suggestion is that he is gay, but I don't think it is said explicitly—who abandon their roots for the bright lights of London during the Swinging Sixties. He gets a job, but it isn't enough to pay the rent on their Soho flat and feed themselves, but then a man gives her money for brightening up his day, and she thinks she is on to something.
Then a rich man gifts her a posh flat, where she changes her name to Corral and begins a career as an upmarket sex worker, with Walter looking after her and vetting the customers. She also enters into London society, rubbing shoulders with celebrities and pop stars of the day, until a man persuades her to run away with him to Malta, and she and Walter part company. Malta doesn't work out, and she ends up back in the UK, struggling to make ends meet now she has aged a few years, but Walter doesn't know this and assumes she is still living the high life while he is back up north looking after his aging mother.
The play is framed as an interview, fifty years after they last saw one another, which gives justification for techniques that Cartwright has used before, such as lots of narration that merges into scenes and a pair of actors who take multiple supporting roles as well as playing their main characters: Kelly dons an Elvis wig as Carol's hometown boyfriend Eddy and, when she does a Shirley Valentine to Malta, has a dodgy moustache like Tom Conti's in the film of that play, while Welch is a young sex worker whom Walter tries and fails to look after and who meets a tragic end.
Cartwright's dialogue is a distinctive combination of northern colloquial speech with a heightened, more poetic rhythm. There are some funny lines and tender moments, all delivered well by two very experienced actors, but despite the short running time (too short to really need an interval), there is a lot in the script that feels like padding, such as long lists name-dropping celebrities or of short-lived jobs they both do.
Anthony Banks's production makes good use of a couple of sliding panels that act as both a half-curtain and a projection screen, with some effective video from Sam Diaz, but there is little variation in the tone of the delivery, and some long changes between short scenes kill any pace that it has. The sad ending feels a bit contrived and doesn't fit with the idea of simultaneous interviews to a journalist.
While it's great to see actors of this calibre at Hope Mill again, even their best efforts aren't enough to make these thinly drawn characters real enough for us to care too much about them. While quite amusing at times, it's far from the best show in town.