Chris Eldon Lee reviews ‘The Full Monty’, which is at Wolverhampton Grand Theatre until Saturday 29th November – and touring into 2015.
The Full Monty would never have been written but for Margaret Thatcher.
At the beginning of the 1980s she set her sights on the steel workers of Sheffield. So many men were made redundant, it was only a matter of time before some of them came up with a particularly ingenious way of making ends meet.
To prove my point, a bust of Mrs Thatcher appears centre stage – and I won’t tell you where they stick the chewing gum.
Simon Beaufoy has transformed his 1997 film into a 21st century stage phenomenon, which is filling a highly enthusiastic Wolverhampton Grand Theatre all this week. I’ll admit the audience wasn’t entirely composed of women; but there were no queues for the gents at half time and the famous gag about the Arsenal off-side trap didn’t get a titter.
But everything else did.
The story line and scene sequence faithfully follow the film…and, needless to say, the final fling remains intact. There are plenty of ribald willy jokes along the way…. “are we talking Shire horse or Shetland pony”… but the live drama actually allows the dreams and desperation of the six unemployed men – and their incredulous wives – to hit home much harder than I recall in the celluloid version.
The star on stage for me was young Raif Clarke, whose turn it was that night to play the pivotal role of Nathan. His dad Gaz (played with great gusto by Gary Lucy) has to find the cash to pay the maintenance money to retain access to his son. And so the story starts. Nathan becomes the strippers’ manager, nervously putting on the familiar dance routine records to loud cheers from the audience (interestingly, Hot Chocolate at half speed sounds just as sexy) and raiding his piggy bank to fund the fun.
There is real humanity here. It’s a delicately written father/son relationship and Nathan finally losing his rag with his dithering dad is an air-punching moment.
It’s good to see an actor of the calibre and pedigree of Andrew Dunn throwing his all into the part of Gerald the foreman, too ashamed to tell his wife (Kate Woods) he’s on the dole. And whilst the women’s roles are brief; they are pithy, pertinent and very much to the point – rounding out the story into a social study of the time.
The show even casts a spotlight on another emerging issue of the 80s, the acceptance of gay men in an industrial community. Rupert Hill as the blond bombshell Guy, and Bobby Schofield as his newfound friend earn audible sympathy from the assembled ladies in the auditorium. But their keenness may also have something to do with Guy’s equipment. Even seen from the rear, there’s a strong suggestion that he’s definitely at the Shire Horse end of the spectrum. Prosthetics, I presume.
All this, of course, simply adds up to the longest tease in show business. It’s the last five minutes that matter most. In the end, it’s all done in the best possible taste; which means the lighting technician must be on very good money.
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