Make Good – Marsden Mechanics and Touring

Samuel Gosrani, Victoria Brazier and Charlotte Delima in Make Good at Marsden Mechanics and Touring. Picture: Andrew Billington

Make Good was reviewed at Marsden Mechanics, Huddersfield. The tour continues until 1 December 2024.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

It’s not often I come out of a musical wishing there had been less singing. And I don’t mean this as an insult, however much it might seem like one. It’s just that the hard-working cast of four have enough to do and the songs sometimes just get in the way.

Nonetheless, Make Good is a musical. It’s a musical that sheds light on the devastating Horizon IT scandal, a real dark chapter in British Post Office history and one that was brought to an even wider public consciousness earlier this year in the ITV dramatisation, Mr Bates vs The Post Office. Jeanie O’Hare has penned the book alongside Jim Fortune (music and lyrics), Maimuna Memon (additional music) and Ed Gaughan (additional material).

Director Elle While’s heartfelt production, presented by Pentabus and New Perspectives, focuses on the harrowing experiences of subpostmasters who were unjustly accused of theft due to faulty software reporting financial discrepancies. The scandal resulted in more than 900 subpostmasters being wrongfully convicted between 1999 and 2015. The wrongful convictions led to job losses, financial ruin, family breakdowns and even suicide. A handful of them are brought to light with tender treatment

Ed Gaughan, Victoria Brazier, Samuel Gosrani and Charlotte Delima work their socks off in a range of sub-postmaster, customer and bureaucratic and prosecutory roles. Gaughan introduces the whole show, leaping through the fourth wall from the off and promising the audience in Marsden, West Yorkshire that if they don’t like it they’ll do Mamma Mia! in the second half. Much like the songs, which are a ragbag of (albeit well performed) mismatched musical numbers that veer from Hadestown to Blood Brothers but can’t quite settle on a style, the stand-up style intro is unnecessary and detracts from what is a gripping, beautifully acted and heartfelt portrayal of a shocking and ongoing miscarriage of justice.

As we walk through the storyline, one we all know the ending to, there’s a palpable and well-choreographed sense of panic. Receipts fly around the room, phones ring insistently, the lights of the menacing Horizon computer system flash ominously. It’s claustrophobic and totally gripping. Of course, this is theatre with a social conscience so there are obligatory digs at Tony Blair, the Daily Mail, Thatcher (these theatrical tropes are as English as the post offices gently mocked in one of the opening numbers) and Trump. But, certainly in this Pennine mechanics institute, we wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Hazel Davis