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Blackpool’s golden smile
September in the Rain
Lichfield Garrick Rep
***** THIS might be just a play but it is more
authentic than any of the offerings from that great misnomer of our age,
reality TV. Sarah Jane Buckley and
David Lonsdale bring Liz and Jack to life. They become the Yorkshire
couple who have loved and squabbled their way through more than 40 years
of marriage. This is not Hollywood wedded bliss, soft focus,
glossy lips and romantic music; this is a marriage which has had
its ups and downs, its doubts, its difficulties, rows and falling outs,
making ups, a marriage where romance is taken as read rather than read
out loud.- a life till death us do part that most people recognise.. We never really know what goes on in other
I could see echoes of my parents, particularly,
my father in Jack and Liz and nods of approval and remarks from audience
members filing out in the interval confirmed this was a memory play for
just about everyone there. We first meet Jack as an old man. He is a retired
miner with a fast failing heart and, although never stated, is perhaps
not long for this world as he makes what is probably his last annual
pilgrimage with wife Liz to Blackpool. They talk of perhaps going off to the East Coast
instead of Blackpool next year, up to the North East, Geordies, but we
know it is little more than a dream; Jack’s heart might be big but it is
failing fast.
As they sit on the seafront, comfortable in
themslves, they reminisce about a married lifetime of holidays in the
boarding houses of Blackpool, of shared tables with sewerage workers, of
tiny rooms next to a toilet being flushed all night long, of tears at
The Student Prince at the Winter Gardens, and the rows, seemingly
every year as they got ready to leave. John Godber’s writing, and he was in the Press
night audience, is about ordinary life and the inspiration for September
in the Rain comes from his grandparents and his own experiences. For the
first 19 years of his life he went to Blackpool, in September, and
stayed at Mavis’s Guest House on Woodfield Road. September was the Yorkshire miners’ holidays,
coming after the summer long Wakes weeks of Lancashire mill towns. Godber’s memory has no Indian summers, he said:
“Invariably the weather was nice on our arrival, we had two days
of sunshine, and then it pelted it down for the rest of the week. On the
day we were return to West Yorkshire the sun would come out again.”
Probably not every year, but it is what he remembers just as school
holidays in summer were always filled with blue skies. Thus, in Godber’s world, Jack and Liz spend a lot of time in that Blackpool holiday essential, the Pakamac, walking up and down the Prom and sitting in shelters eating fish and chips out of paper. The two actors make their characters very human,
real people and in the intimate confines of the studio we become part of
their memories as they relive scenes from the past. Jack is a big, burly and at times cantankerous
miner, working in a hole in the ground he tells us, and always ready to
settle any argument or perceived affront with his fists, although he
never does. He is full of bluster and quick to take offence yet the big,
tough, take on anybody miner shows a vulnerability, refusing to strip
beyond shirt sleeves and rolled up trouser legs on the beach, a dislike
of crowds and people, a fear of going up Blackpool Tower and admitting
his moods of anger and aggression are triggered by an intense jealousy
when it came to his wife Liz. He obviously loves her dearly, in his own way,
but it is not manly in the miners’ world to show affection. Like coal in
the ground, it is there, but you have to dig it out. Liz comes to accept her husband’s . . . well not
so much failings as what and who he is. There are walk outs when Jack gets too much,
which don’t last long, and she finds she is to blame for pretty much
everything and anything that goes wrong, at least she is according to
Jack, a trait common with many husbands. But behind all the bluster, anger and aggression she is the calming influence and we see her mellow and accept as the years pass until we reach the present, where we opened, and she is on probably her last trip with a dying husband.
We have seen her admiring and wondering, never
seriously, when she sees more handsome, more refined, more film star
looking men, and seen her affronted at the slightest suggestion of
impropriety by an attractive young man in the ice cream queue. These are
daydreams not real ones and we are all allowed those those. The play jumps around from the 1950s, through two
children and countless guest houses, to where director Gareth Tudor
Price has set the present, in the 1990s and he and the cast have added
some lovely clever touches, such as engaging the audience in passing as
onlookers or as deckchair attendants. There are visually well observed comic moments
such as Liz unable to see at the theatre, or Jack’s attempt to set up a
deckchair – and we have all been there – and the pride, and applause,
when he sets a second one up in one easy movement. Then there are his laboured attempts to sit in
and get out of deckchairs, not the easiest seating for big burly miners. By the end we had shared part of Liz and Jack’s
life; we have seen them as a young couple, seen them grow old, cared
about them as real people, we had laughed, a lot, and we felt for them
and the inevitable future they are now facing – and that says everything
you need to know about the performances of Lonsdale and Buckley. The simple setting from John Brooking, with a
backdrop of the prom and tower, which light up at night, is effective
while the lighting from Jonathan Martlew deserves a mention cleverly
picking out areas of the stage or reproducing clouds passing over the
sun it was noticeable for all the right reasons. Lichfiled Garrick Rep
has built a reputation for quality productions and this can only enhance
it. As studio productions go, this is up there with the best. To
21-06-14 Roger Clarke
03-06-14
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people’s
marriages but from the nods and murmurs, smiles and knowing laughs, it
was a marriage and people with which most in the audience could
identify. 
And that includes Jack reversing into a van behind the new family car
while they were stuck in a traffic jam at Preston.