At the age of 30, the Beatles’s legendary manager, Brian Epstein, published his autobiography. At 32 he was dead, and his passing is widely considered the beginning of the end for the band. Tom Wright’s fascinating new play is less concerned with Epstein’s effect on a group of messy haired, leather-jacketed Liverpudlians than with their effect on him. In particular, it focuses on the relationship with John Lennon that would come to define the life of a Jewish gay man who, for all his success, always felt an outsider.
We first meet Brian as a young man in his father’s record shop, replacing Bruch’s violin concerto with Elvis’s Hound Dog. His dad is happy to encourage his instincts in the baffling new world of 1960s pop – “Which Richard is the little one?” he’s forced to ask – but as the play’s breakneck opening makes clear, his son’s homosexuality is a source of shame and danger. Tom Piper’s mobile set of spinning closets (the shop also sells furniture) tumbles him down menacing corridors and alleyways; a shadowy Cavern Club reinforces the sense of a life concealed and buried.
