The Beautiful Game continues at The Other Palace, London until 18 August 2018.
Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩
When it comes to exploring the Northern Ireland Troubles of the 1960s and 1970s, neither Ben Elton nor Andrew Lloyd Webber were names that would immediately spring to mind. Perhaps unsurprisingly, their 2000 musical The Beautiful Game was not a great success, running for 11 months in the West End. Since then, it has been reworked several times, including having its big 11 o’clock number ‘Our Kind of Love’ extracted and reworked to become the title number for Love Never Dies.
While the production now bears the name of the 2000 West End run, it is now substantially different in its storytelling, after a series of workshops in the late 2000s culminated in a restaged, rescripted version mounted in Canada under the title of The Boys in the Photograph. After being reunited with its original title, the musical has seen further tweaks since, as could be seen when it was revived at the Union Theatre in 2014.
At first sight, this brief revival as part of National Youth Music Theatre’s summer programme seems to benefit from the age of its young cast. Like the British Theatre Academy’s production of Bring It On, having a cast of actors play people their own age brings a vibrancy and vitality to this revival’s early moments, as a team of young Catholic boys (and one atheist, from a Protestant family) revel in their carefree lives as part of the local church’s football team.
And it is in the moments of camaraderie and friendly teasing that Elton’s script is most comfortable. Lloyd Webber’s score – much closer here to the youthful exuberance of School of Rock than the po-faced cod opera of Phantom – fits with the initial mood, too.
The young cast, led by 19-year-old Reuben Browne as team captain John, excel in the football-themed stages. Matt Cole’s choreography, transforming a cup final into an all-male ballet, is Act I’s big highlight, ably performed by an ensemble ranging in age from 15 to 21.
As the Troubles escalate, though, so do the troubles for the musical. Elton loses his grip on the story whenever the comedy gives way to political and paramilitary subjects. Indeed, it is the young cast who save the show from falling into trite melodrama, thanks to some sterling portrayals of young people who are forced into adulthood too early.
In particular, Ned Costello’s Thomas, who becomes an IRA “provo” and risks dragging his old footballing friends into the fight as well, delivers a sympathetic performance of a character who, on the page, deserves no such sympathy.
As the central couple, Browne and Aliza Vakil as his girlfriend (and then wife) Mary provide a realistic and believable romantic bedrock to proceedings, while West End star Jasper Britton’s Father O’Donnell provides both comedic stereotype and social conscience as required.
This production doesn’t quite map out happy endings for its characters in the way that The Boys in the Photograph tried to do – after a story which includes murder, imprisonment and kneecapping, it feels appropriate that ways out of the violence for its principal characters should be hoped for, rather than displayed. Director Hannah Chissick negates some of that good decision, though, by having her romantic leads’ reunion in the finale visible only through a small window in the set.
But such small niggles aside, BYMT delivers a cracking rendition of a highly-flawed musical.
Scott Matthewman
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