Shafted! theatre review
Tue 28th April 2015
Shafted! is the first collaboration between John Godber and Jane Thornton in 23 years. The performance is showing at East Riding Theatre 25 April – 10 May.
Just Beverley reader, Ali Davies, told us what she thought.
The play is set mainly in Upton, West Yorkshire over a 30 year period starting in 1984 at the height of the miners’ strike and focuses on a couple and their trials and tribulations of working and family life. The couple are played by husband and wife John Godber; who wrote the play and Jane Thornton.
The couple struggle, like many during that time, to keep their heads above water and take on a number of projects to improve their income, including window cleaning and running a B&B in Bridlington. The scenes are snapshots of married life, and you are drawn into these two likeable characters’ lives as they face loss of a way of life. They are battlers who use their sense of humour as armour to protect themselves from all that is going on around them.
The script is witty and poignant. John Godber identified that while there was much written about the miners’ strike of 1984/85 there was almost nothing written about the lives of mining families. This play is a little gem as we are made aware that these individuals’ livelihoods are at the mercy of the powerful forces of government policy and subsequent economic and social change. Sound familiar? This is the beauty of this play. You don't need to have been around in the 1980s to understand the impact of recession on a normal working family.
The dialogue and interplay between the two characters is superb and the subtle expressions between them are strengthened by having a married couple play the parts. There are times in the play when you can't help reflecting on your own relationship and saying to yourself ‘yep, we have had one of those conversations’.
The music played between scenes provides a trip down memory lane with eighties classics such as T’Pau’s China in your Hand and Frankie goes to Hollywood’s Two Tribes. The music is a clever trick and is used like a film soundtrack to reflect the mood changes between scenes.
I would urge you to go and see Shafted! and support East Riding Theatre in bringing quality productions like this to the stage.
