When did society become so polarised? Angela (Joann Condon) reckons it was 2005 with Jamie Oliver. As a dinner lady, she had to throw out the Turkey Twizzlers when the TV chef turned his guns on junk food. It is a wonky analysis but you can see where she is coming from.
Her confusion is partly the point. Playwright and director Jamie Eastlake wants to make sense of a country pulled to Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’s far-right protests and to Just Stop Oil’s civil disobedience. In a complex world, we are reassured by simple answers, but what is the actual cause of our discontent?
Angela is the Good Fairy of the piece. Twenty years in the north-east with her Tottenham accent intact, she has a heart-driven sense of right and wrong. She is all community spirit. After an epiphany seeing football manager Ange Postecoglou, she reinvents herself as Big Ange and helps turn the school team into a winning squad.
Meanwhile, the forces of good and evil are lining up to fight for the soul of 18-year-old Steven Mooney (Curtis Appleby), a Blyth boy distressed by his Northumberland town’s economic decline and eager to find someone to blame. Will he go with big sister Caroline (Erin Mullen) who has taken her socialist values south for a comfortable life of middle-class protest? Or will he throw in his lot with the charmingly sinister fascist with no name (Lucy Eve Mann) who encourages his Islamophobic online videos?
It is close enough to Christmas to guess how this morality tale will play out, but that is not to underestimate the importance of the playwright’s questions. Eastlake, who continues to enjoy success with his adaptation of Jonathan Tulloch’s Gerry & Sewell, has some uneven writing, underdeveloped themes and the odd misfiring joke as he swings between his parallel stories, but he also has a keen sense that all these issues – deprivation, justice, radicalisation – need to be discussed openly with empathy and humour.
As a director, his fielding of an all-dancing, all-scoring chorus of eight, in defiance of the small stage, is a shrewd move. Their synchronised exuberance gives theatrical life to questions affecting us all.
