The emotional high point of Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff is the funeral of George Malone. The death of this retired Liverpool docker is powerful not only because he is the one uncomplicatedly good character in the 1982 series, a masterpiece of television drama, but because he is a figurehead of socialist values. In a drama about the debilitating effects of unemployment, George symbolises the time before right-wing economics laid waste to working-class pride.
Playwright James Graham rightly places the scene at the culmination of his powerful stage adaptation for the Royal Court and Stockroom. But he also does something clever with it. As the unemployed labourers congregate to remember George (an excellent Andrew Schofield), Graham overlays the liturgy of the Catholic funeral mass with the banal call-and-response questions of the dole office. Suddenly, the scriptures of church and state look as formulaic as each other.
