Gerry & Sewell ★★

Gerry and Sewell is the most recent iteration of Olivier Award-winning producer Jamie Eastlake’s latest project as writer and director – an adaptation of Purely Belter, a movie from the year 2000, itself an adaptation of Jonathan Tulloch’s novel Season Ticket. Under Eastlake, the show has unbelievably morphed from a pub-theatre-scale two-hander into a fully realised West End spectacle, complete with a moving on-set train and caravan, a seemingly unlimited ensemble chorus, and a transfer to the legendary Aldwych.

The show, coming in at around 2 hours 20 minutes, details a series of events in the lives of our titular Gerry and Sewell – a comedic pair of Newcastle United supporters hell-bent on securing season tickets by any means necessary.

The problem is that they spend very little time in the play actually trying to get season tickets. The show takes a quick pivot and becomes an investigation of the impacts of intra-familial sexual abuse. Not exactly the raucous, puppet-filled ode to hooliganism one might be expecting from the marketing material. The topic of sexual abuse in the family is definitely an area absolutely worthy of exploration and representation on stage – but is it necessary to do it in between gags about shagging in a caravan? The juxtaposition of comedy and darkness can make for a beautiful show, but here, this subplot (which uses the stage time of a main plot) feels a touch inappropriate because the tone of the piece seems to oscillate so intensely between slapstick, life-defining trauma, dance sequences, musical numbers, and poetry. These scenes become entirely dependent on the actors to carry them rather than the story structure – and they make a good go of it. Erin Mullen is particularly good as Bridget, and Jack Robertson is notable for his comedic timing and patient, skilful joke delivery. In fact, a few of the best gags in the play are his fourth-wall-breaking audience asides – which unfortunately become overplayed in the play’s second half.

There is an impressive amount of physical theatre in this piece. There seem to be several thousand black-clad hooligans onstage at points, and the atmosphere they create, particularly at the beginning and end, is really quite amazing to see. The audience is encouraged to record the opening sequence – where many members of the audience revealed black and white Wor flags which they waved in unison while the cast and ensemble danced and raved onstage to wild music and flashing lights. There was a real sense of chaos and excitement in the theatre, and it felt like there was really something there in this moment – it felt a shame that after this opening sequence this device of drawing in and including the audience wasn’t used again.

The physical movement of the ensemble sometimes appears a little under-rehearsed and underdeveloped. An effect that isn’t aided by the addition of the character Brabin – also known in the development notes as “Tyneside”, a minor antagonist and poetic narrator – a fusion of a local menace with a kind of folk spirit representing the Tyneside area – who, whilst gyrating, intones slam poetry about the vibe of the area. These come as interludes between scenes – which hints at the core of the show’s issues – its disparity.

There is a notable lack of structure in this show. The narrative comprises a series of tonally opposed vignettes – very rarely do we know what’s at stake, and even actually where, or when, we are. The set design, lighting and costumes are incredible and deserve praise – creating powerful images and strong effects at points. But they aren’t effectively used – the characters seem to jump around time and space with little regard for what’s actually onstage with them. At one point, the characters get on a dilapidated and clearly out-of-use train. In this scene, it becomes apparent that they’re supposed to actually be taking the train to go somewhere – but the only reason we know they’re going somewhere is because Sewell makes a fourth-wall-breaking joke about the disparity between the actual set and the fact that they are supposed to be on an actual functional train. The train isn’t used for any other scene. Why wouldn’t they build a train that looks like a train that works? Why have any of these specific locations if the action is going to take place pretty much entirely within the imagined reality created between the two actors? There are several moments where it is very difficult to work out where the drama is taking place, but there is one particular moment where the Angel of the North reveals itself in the background, which is touching and works well – more of this strategic and scene-specific set building would have made for a much more effective piece.

What seems to have happened is that there was at one point a very effective smaller piece, a series of spatially distinct vignettes, loosely based on a film that most of its audience was already familiar with, played out by two actors in a small, intimate venue. The spatial issues would be solved by the lack of set. It wouldn’t matter if they were on a train, in a caravan, by a riverside, or in someone’s living room – the sense of place could be created by performance alone. Now, with a large, complex, multilayered set, the jumping around of location and time becomes far more confusing. The familiarity of the audience with the original would do a lot to remedy this confusion, but for those who haven’t seen or read the source material, it becomes a significant barrier to engaging with the story. With this transfer the production has opted for maximalism instead of a consolidation, and it’s a shame. There is a great story here, and one can clearly see that the smaller show must have worked well. This story is patently an important one, one that is crying out to be told and heard. Unfortunately, this telling doesn’t do it justice.