It’s been a long time coming. Ever since Yosser Hughes strode onto the screen in 1982 and into television drama history, with his brilliant, heartbreaking catchphrase “Gizza job”, people have been urging Alan Bleasdale to bring Boys from the Blackstuff to the stage. But somehow it never happened.
“Kevin Fearon at the Liverpool Royal Court Theatre used to ask me every year,” recalls the Liverpudlian playwright, laughing. “And I’d always say, ‘I can’t do it.’”
Broadcast on the BBC, Blackstuff became an instant classic: the story of desperate, unemployed Liverpudlian tarmac-layers seemed to speak for a nation where 3 million were jobless. It felt both urgent and timeless, its vivid, witty characters surely perfect for the stage. But Bleasdale couldn’t see a way to wrangle five episodes of screen drama into a tight-knit stage play – until 2018. That’s when director Kate Wasserberg had the super-smart idea of pairing Bleasdale with James Graham, author of television drama Sherwood and multiple award-winning political stage plays.
All three met in a Chinese restaurant in Liverpool. “Kate introduced us and then I think she went to the bathroom for a deliberately long amount of time so we could chat on our own…” says Graham, with a wry smile.
It worked. He and Bleasdale instantly hit it off. Talking to them now, the affinity is palpable – as is the mutual affection and respect. (Graham says Sherwood was hugely influenced by Bleasdale’s work). The result is a cracking, very funny two-hour stage play that keeps all the wit, honesty and pathos of the original, but reshapes it for stage.
“I genuinely think of Alan as the Scouse Arthur Miller,” says Graham. “I think of these characters as having a scale to Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. And coming from a similar background to Alan [Graham grew up in a mining community in Nottinghamshire], it’s very important to me that these working-class men and women are eloquent, that they observe the world and express it with wit and pain and beauty and poetry.
Bleasdale says that Graham was able to bring an outsider’s eye to the original and see a way of refocusing it for stage. At the heart is Yosser, who’s already lost his job and his wife and is terrified of losing his kids. He has some of the drama’s funniest lines, but his spiral towards breakdown is also desperately moving. For Bleasdale, Yosser was critical. “He had to take the show and carry it on his back. But, for me, the people he was carrying on his back were equally important.”
“Everyone remembers Yosser Hughes,” agrees Graham. “And why wouldn’t you? He’s one of the most iconic characters on British television in the 20th century. But we both understood that we need Chrissie’s story too. So onstage he actually gets offered a job that he just can’t bear to take because he thinks it’s a betrayal of his values.
The fight for Chrissie’s soul becomes almost like the fight for Liverpool’s soul and the fight for Britain’s soul. Do you go for your individualistic needs and wants – understandably in difficult times – or do you try to stay true to your values?”
Many people remember Blackstuff as a scathing critique of Thatcherism. In fact, Bleasdale started writing it in the 1970s: he could see the way the wind was blowing. By the time it was broadcast, he’d been proved right.
“If you walked the streets of Liverpool, you knew what was going to happen,” he says. “And I think if it had gone out in 1977 or 1978 it would not have had the impact that it did in 1982 when there were millions of people all over the country in a terrible state.”
Forty years on, it shouldn’t feel relevant. But while some things have changed, what’s shocking is how true it feels. The play remains very funny, but it still hits home too for a society where people struggle with economic hardship, crumbling public services, precarious employment and the scourge of in-work poverty.
Some specifics may have changed then, but the human cost has not. For Graham, that’s what makes the play so powerful for today: it doesn’t preach politics, it just draws a group of ordinary people, who are articulate, funny and real, and shows the impact of not feeling valued. He points to Dixie, working as a security guard at the docks.
“I think what Dixie represents is what happens to the dignity of men when their pride is taken away from them,” he says. “In the communities we grew up in we were told that work defines you. And if the system demands that of you, but then the same system won’t allow you to work, what does that do to your dignity? What does that do to your sense of identity? It breaks my heart to watch Dixie’s decline.
The play has now been shown in the West End and at the National Theatre. But for both Bleasdale and Graham, it really matters that it is seen around in cities and towns all around the country. In every place, it will feel slightly different. That, says Graham, is one of the key differences between watching it onscreen and onstage.
“You’re surrounded by a 1,000 people from your own community,” he says. “So you’re laughing together. And this show is all about community.”
Interview by Sarah Hemming
Photo credit: Seamus Ryan
Boys From The Blackstuff tours to the Theatre Royal Bath from Tuesday 25th February to Saturday 1st March. To book tickets contact the Box Office on 01225 448844 or book online at theatreroyal.org.uk
