The big revelation for me this week was the Royal Court. Not the theatre in London’s Sloane Square but the whopping Liverpool theatre where you are offered different new writing and your supper, cabaret-style, for £30. The venue specialises in work that features the city, which is not a restriction but a focus. It’s selling out – more than 1,000 seats – for its staging, co-produced with Stockroom (formerly Out of Joint), of Boys from the Blackstuff.
Alan Bleasdale had always turned down requests to make a stage version of his television triumph, the tale of tarmacers whose livings were destroyed in the 1980s, which was first a BBC Play for Today then a series. He thought it would work only on the small screen. Then director Kate Wasserberg introduced him to the plays of James Graham. Bleasdale was converted: Graham has, he says, “taken my voice and thrown it” – thrown it so that it lands in the present with a punch.
