Review: Get Carter – Northern Stage, Newcastle

First published in The Times, Monday February 22 2016

Four Stars

Get Carter, a gritty, cynical gangster film, in which Michael Caine’s antihero wanders Newcastle seeking vengeance for his brother’s murder, has grown in critical reputation since its release in 1971 and is considered by some to be a masterpiece of British cinema. The same cannot be said of the source novel, Jack’s Return Home by Ted Lewis, which languished out of print for many years until being republished under the film’s title in the early Nineties.

Review: What Falls Apart – Live Theatre, Newcastle

First published in The Times, Tuesday 28 April 2015

Two Stars

Torben Betts’s new political drama begins promisingly enough with an encounter between a former Labour minister (Nigel Hastings) and the young barman of a smart but deserted Newcastle hotel (Kevin Wathen). Once considered a firebrand of the political left, Tom Savage lost his seat after the 2003 invasion of Iraq and has now been parachuted into his party’s northeast heartland. But his campaign isn’t going to plan. As the reaction on the doorsteps has veered between indifference and downright hostility, Tom has increasingly sought solace in the bottom of a wine glass.

His late-night conversation with the barman gradually exposes the rift between the career politician and the people he professes to represent. Oxbridge-educated and metropolitan in world view, Tom is patronising in his response to the self-educated, Blake-quoting northerner. “I admire more than anyone the articulate, intelligent working class,” he tells his companion at one point, unaware that the barman has an unflattering selfie on his phone, taken with a drunken Tom the night before.

Betts’s play, like its protagonist, runs into trouble with the arrival of a mysterious fellow hotel guest (Zannah Hodson), who claims to be the politician’s biggest fan. As the night wears on and both of Tom’s drinking companions are revealed to be not quite what they seem, the recriminations fly and the characters start to feel more like mouthpieces for contrasting political ideologies than real people.

Hodson’s character, a right-winger whose views would make Katie Hopkins blush, seems particularly sketchily drawn. Meanwhile, though Max Roberts’s production features some dynamic moments, particularly towards the end, it struggles to find a coherent tone, abruptly shifting from gentle satire to black comedy and melodrama.

The script is so up-to-the-minute that you imagine the playwright was still tinkering with it on opening night. The play contains references to the prospect of an ultra-hung parliament and the arrival of the SNP and Ukip as significant players on the British party-political scene. Yet Betts takes far too long to arrive at his central theme – the long shadow cast by the Blair government’s role in the Iraq war – leaving a nagging feeling that the scenario would have been more effectively realised with some judicious editing.
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