Sting’s ship of dreams veers on to the rocks of Leftie schmaltz
AS A dizzyingly rich pop star, Sting could have taken it easy, counting his money and oiling his limbs for the occasional bout of tantric gymnastics with lovely wife Trudie.
Instead, to his credit, he has spent years honing a romantic musical about the decline of shipbuilding in his home town of Wallsend on Tyneside.
Geographically and politically, The Last Ship is roughly in Billy Elliot territory. Some of the story is set in the days of Thatcherism, when global competition caught up with British heavy industry and its trade unions.
Alongside some clunky politics we have a love story about naval officer Gideon who returns to Wallsend after 17 years and encounters Meg (Frances McNamee), the girl he left behind. Gideon is played handsomely by Richard Fleeshman, whose husky singing voice is disconcertingly like that of Sting.
The Wallsend skyline — well depicted on a backdrop of scudding clouds and angular cranes — is dominated by the outline of a not-yet finished ship, the Utopia. Some of the action is staged inside the cathedral hulk of the Utopia. Other scenes are set in the nearby pub run by single-mother Meg.
The story pits brutal, foolish, capitalist management against a heroic Geordie workforce led by a wise foreman (Joe McGann) and a communist shop steward (Joe Caffrey). Good grief. You’d never guess that Mr Sting was a tax-savvy plutocrat with his own global brand.
When the foreman’s health starts to fail, brace yourself for one of several corny plot devices: gallant working man in drawn-out death scene urging his fellow proletarians to see the job through to the end.
I happen to be a sucker for this sort of thing, as well as northern repartee and foot-stamping songs by proud working- class women. Accompanied by Sting’s intricate and original music (played by a good five-piece band), long stretches become thoroughly watchable.
There are numerous vignettes, not least from Charlie Hardwick as the foreman’s wife and a song led by Annie Grace about how the women love their impossible husbands. That has more footstamping. Stamp, stamp, stamp. It gives the show an insistence, but it lacks Billy Elliot’s balletic softness and that important sense of something bigger than even NorthEastern industrial tribalism.
WHENthe shipyard is put out of business, the workers decided to honour their industrial skills and finish that last ship, without pay. They will launch it and maybe sail to Lindisfarne. As the plot veers into implausibility, we may see the ship as a metaphor: a vessel of life’s dreams. Or we may just suspect that Sting is racked with nostalgia for the Tyneside he quit as a young man. Has he not heard that the place is booming (and often voting Tory) these days? Though I lapped up the soupier cliches and enjoyed the full-hearted (if over-amplified) performances, the politics become absurd.
An Eighties Government minister is caricatured with Maggie- style vowels and blue jacket. And the framing device of a narrator, initially no more than twee, becomes annoying when she closes with a lecture about listening to the political views of the ‘beautiful, powerful’ workers of Tyne & Wear and it all starts going decidedly Corbyn with some stuff about how we need to save ‘our NHS’.
This in a show whose programme sneers at the very Brexit which those same valiant North-Easterners voted for in the EU referendum.
Stick to the music, Mr Sting.