Russell At His Funniest

Of all the plays by Willy Russell, Breezeblock Park may well be his laugh-out-loud funniest.

Certainly the audience hilarity at the Liverpool Playhouse last night often reached near fever pitch.

But, as with all Russell's plays, there is a more serious side to his comedy, a story of women forced to accept their rather miserable lot.

For the most part, it is a Keeping Up Appearances-style tale of two sisters trying to outdo each other with their household purchases.

Betty is hosting a Christmas party and keen to show off her three-piece suite which grows in price on each telling. But sister Reeny arrives and insists on keeping on her coat as the house is a little chilly - she has just had central heating installed, she announces.

Betty's husband Syd couldn't care less while Reeny's husband Ted is a know-all and keen car-owner who insists on staring through the curtains in case anything happens to his vehicle. Their son John just likes staring zombie-like at the television.

Throw in Betty's boozing husband Tommy and his daft wife Vera and you have all the ingredients for an awkward night. And, to add to the fun, Betty's daughter Sandra is pregnant and planning to run off with her posh student boyfriend Tim.

Set in the 1970s - when it was written - Breezeblock Park has a nostalgic feel while retaining characters still familiar today.

Russell keeps it all boiling very happily while director Glen Walford in this production goes straight for the funnybone with a superb ensemble cast. Pauline Daniels is excellent as the hapless Betty, trying to keep up appearances despite every disaster thrown at her. Her monologue about life on a council estate is also most moving.

Michael Starke gets every ounce of fun out of her as husband Syd while Andrew Schofield is a knockout as know-all Ted, the chap who is always trying to outdo the student with a series of questions taken from books.

Neil Caple's "let's go to the pub" Tommy is great and so are the rest of the cast in a comedy where a vibrator mistaken for a cocktail mixer remains one of the great comic ideas.

PHILIP KEY

Liverpool Daily Post

 

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Breezeblock Park
1974 was the year of Wombling Merry Christmas, of Morecambe and Wise dancing with Pan's People and Henry Cooper exhorting blokes to splash it all over. It was also the year that Willy Russell proved he could write structured, well-made plays.

Breezeblock Park, the story of a grisly Christmas on a Liverpool council estate, was so sturdily built that advocates of Russell's looser, more militant style saw it as a betrayal. He was even collared by a furious member of the Workers' Revolutionary Party, who accused him of undermining the class struggle by presenting the proletariat in a bad light.

Russell was doing nothing of the sort: he was merely observing that the simmering tensions within all families are most likely to boil over in the pressure cooker of Christmas. But he chose to do so at a time when pressure cookers, fondue sets, hostess trollies and teasmaids were still perceived as a pretty neat idea.

Glen Walford's strongly cast production makes a hugely entertaining period piece, though its comic premise would scarcely be credible today. With branches of Ann Summers in every high street, it is inconceivable that someone would gullibly believe a vibrator to be the latest in cordless cocktail stirrers.

Pauline Daniels turns in a wonderfully pursed performance as Betty, the woman who gets the wrong end of the stick, as it were. And there are fine contributions from the rest of the cast, all of whom seem, with hindsight, to be prototypes for the Royle Family. The programme even reprints a fan letter Russell once received from Caroline Aherne ("I'm 22-and-a-half, full of fun and there's plenty of mileage to be had out of me"). So it's official - you saw them here first.

ALFRED HICKLING

The Guardian

 

 

The letter from Caroline Aherne, then an unknown drama student, is here. She bravely wrote about this letter in her new found role as a columnist for The Sunday Times.