Quentin Letts
BLINDSIDED By Simon Stephens, Manchester Royal Exchange ★★✩✩✩
CORONATION Street actress Julie Hesmondhalgh, fresh from her small-screen euthanasia scene as Hayley Cropper, has opened in an unconvincing, sweary little play in Manchester.
Miss Hesmondhalgh is a reasonable stage actress, all right. She and the rest of the cast in director Sarah Frankcom’s competent production do the business. The problem with the show is the story by Simon Stephens.
It opens in 1979 with 17-year- old Cathy meeting a flash youth called John. He claims to be an accountant but he is a burglar (same fing?). Worse, he is a Thatcherite.
Mr Stephens does not seem to approve of Mrs Thatcher. The play’s most sensitive character, a left-wing barber who reads a lot about history, declares that Mrs T is a ‘harridan’. But why? There may well be an argument to be made on that, but it is not presented.
Back to the streets of Stockport, where much of the action occurs. Both Cathy (Katie West) and John (Andrew Sheridan) are odd. Violence bubbles in their conversations, in places with echoes of Joe Orton.
They have sex, a moment caught by both of them writhing separately on the bare stage, pumping their groins into the floor and their bottoms in the air. The Royal Exchange being ‘in the round’, I could see the faces of some older folk in the front row. They did not know where to look.
‘Hang on, Dorothy, I thought we’d come to see the lass from Corrie.’
Cathy, who already has a disabled infant daughter, moves in with the psychopathic John. Her mother ( Miss Hesmondhalgh) does not approve. Nor does the left-wing barber (Jack Deam).
John, who calls the disabled daughter ‘little spazzy-bones’ is soon sniffing round another young woman (Rebecca Callard). Fecklessness dominates.
The unpleasantness is pushed way beyond credibility. We keep being given hints about politics – about strikes and an air of Thatcherite reform – but these thoughts are not pursued.
Is foul-mouthed John a metaphor for Thatcherism? With his indolence, it is hard to see. Is Cathy a symbol of what happens after parental or state neglect? Not really. She is just unhinged.
The play ends with a far-fetched reconcilation under blue skies, seemingly because New Labour is about to take power. Oh, puh-lease.