How do you adapt one of the all time great British TV series of the ‘80s for the ‘20s stage? ‘Very respectfully’ is the answer offered by James Graham’s version of Alan Bleasdale’s ‘Boys from the Blackstuff’.
The prolific playwright was seen at the NT just last year with his supremely enjoyable Gareth Southgate drama ‘Dear England’, which was Graham writ large: the writer humorously but deftly synthesising vast amounts of data, facts and characters into one kinetic narrative.
‘Boys from the Blackstuff’ does not feel like a James Graham play. It feels an awful lot like Bleasdale’s landmark 1982 TV drama – even if the execution of the story is often relatively different, the same plot but chopped up, reformatted, at times made a splash more PC. Certainly it’s testimony to Graham’s skill at keeping multiple narrative balls in the air.
Let’s assume you haven’t seen the TV show (you can stream it for free on iPlayer FYI). ‘Boys from the Blackstuff’ concerns the titular group of male Liverpudlian labourers, who as the play begins have already lost their jobs laying tarmac (‘the blackstuff’) due to their ill-advised pursuit of an illicit side-project.
The ‘boys’ are now on the dole, unable to find legitimate work, though they are all proud men and desperate to get back to employment. Indeed, the show spawned a catchphrase to that effect – in the words of the clearly somewhat unhinged Yosser Hughes (played by the late Bernard Hill on TV and Barry Sloane here): ‘gissa job’.
They have, however, found some off the books work which they’re conducting in tandem with signing on - something that has brought them to the attention of Moss (Jamie Peacock), a young DHSS officer determined to make a name for himself.
Graham’s adaptation can’t quite escape the fact that he’s adapting an anthology-style TV series that didn’t have a single storyline running throughout its whole length. Kate Wasserberg’s transferring Liverpool Royal Court production doesn’t really try any fancy tricks - one bit of dramatic harness work aside, it’s stripped back, with a rugged and no-frills industrial-style set from Amy Jane Cook.
What it does incredibly well is trust the characters. Sloane is tremendous as Yosser, a man unhinged by his loss of place in the world - I’m not sure it’s the most accurate or sensitive portrait of mental illness, but I don’t think that’s what Bleasedale was necessarily going for. There is a spectrum of realism amongst the men’s predicaments: Yosser is at the outer edge of it, like some Ancient Greek king whose loss of station has come down in him like a punishment from the gods. More understated but just as powerful is Nathan McMullen’s Chrissie, who is offered a job but feels he can’t take it for ethical reasons – his obstinate refusal to accept it in the face of his desperate wife’s fury and tears is deeply unsettling.
In 2024, ‘Boys from the Blackstuff’ undoubtedly comes across as a period piece: mass unemployment and deindustrialisation are different to the current issues facing this country. But it has a timeless echo in any straightened times. And it is, simply, a tremendous story about men, masculinity and change – about the double edged nature of dignity and pride; about what happens when a society leaves you behind and you can’t follow or obstinately refuse to. And Bleasdale’s characters are just wonderful, avatars of shattered masculinity but also fully rounded characters in their own right. Maybe nobody quite like Yosser Hughes ever really existed. But it was important that Bleasdale invent him. And this stirring play means he and his comrades get to live on a little longer.