The Full Monty at the New Wimbledon Theatre, London and touring until 18 May 2019.
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
This isn’t the American musical we briefly saw in London in 2002 and 2009 but it’s verging on one with eight famous tracks for the six jobless steelworkers to strip to in their one-night-only Bums of Sheffield show.
Hot Chocolate’s ‘You Sexy Thing’, Donna Summer’s ‘Hot Stuff’, Tom Jones’ ‘You Can Keep Your Hat On’ and Serge Gainsbourg’s scandalous-at-the-time ‘Je T’Aime Moi Non Plus’ are four of the numbers the desperate lads gyrate to and eventually show their attributes to a voracious female audience.
Simon Beaufoy’s play, set in Maggie Thatcher’s strike-torn Britain of the 1980s when unemployment was at an all-time high, is a stage version of his Bafta award-winning 1997 movie The Full Monty and is about far more than naked bums and knobs.
It also touchingly embraces the humiliating depths men will sink to in order to feed their families, and touches on themes of loneliness, loss of dignity, masculinity and self-respect that accompanies redundancy and lives with no future.
The group’s former foreman Gerald (Andrew Dunn), even fools his wife for six months by donning suit and carrying briefcase and heading off to work when he has no job to go to.
Meanwhile, she is busy using her credit card and booking a ski-ing holiday “with 20% off”. The full pain of their situation is achingly played out.
After seeing how enthusiastically their wives react when the touring Chippendales hit town, they decide to do a strip show of their own but, in their version, going the whole way, the full Monty.
The crisis has come about when one of them Gaz (Gary Lucy) is threatened with court action by his long-suffering wife for missed child-support payments. If he can’t find the money, he will lose access to the young son who worships him and whom he adores.
The auditions are a hoot. A man called Horse (the brilliant Lee Emerick) turns up leaning on a crutch but puts on such a cheeky show he is quickly signed up, Dave (Kai Owen) frets about the size of his beer belly, while the back view of another candidate with an enormous prosthetic penis hanging down brings Act I to a riotous climax.
It’s a good-natured show with its heart in the right place. Robert Jones’ spare set of a disused, soon-to-pulled-down steelyard is terrific and director Rupert Hill has got almost everything right, although the broadness of the accents for this Southerner was hard to decipher at times.
Many matrons of Wimbledon got mighty excited whenever Lucy threatened to take any of his kit off. It was a noisy evening and great fun. How appropriate that the show’s tour ends in Sheffield.
Jeremy Chapman
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