Politicised pantomime.
That ought to please the playwright Debbie McAndrew, as her reworking of Dario Fo's 1974 play Can't Pay? Won't Pay! shows an affection for an abundance of alliteration, along with that old standby; the corny and deliberately bad joke. Whenever a character in a play or television series is an habitual purveyor of lame gags, an alarm bell starts to ring. It's a very obvious device for any writer who simply cannot come up with a good joke, so they litter their script with dozens of poor ones, thereby excusing themselves if you don't laugh and gaining everything if you do.
Have you realised I hated this yet?
I really did. It was a blessed relief to turn to my friend the minute the interval started to find that we both hated it! So much so that, we excused ourselves to a nearby pub and did not return for the second act. That is something neither of us has ever done before and would never do lightly, but frankly; Northern Broadsides production of They Don't Pay? We Won't Pay! isn't worth the time. Northern Broadsides is right, because this is a very broad comedy of crudely stereotypical northerness. It's ironic that McAndrew has updated a 1970s Italian play to the present day, Brexit torn and austerity struck north of England because it actually feels like an episode of a creaky and abysmal 1970s ITV sitcom like On The Buses, Love Thy Neighbour or The Wackers. I should have known we were in for antiquated entertainment when the cast assembled on the stage before the play commences to warm the audience up with sing-songs of 'When You're Smiling', 'Bring Me Sunshine' and 'Big Yellow Taxi'. I cringed for them, I really did. But even my sympathy was tested by the grotesque mugging the cast then went on to do, with each one pitching their performance to the back wall of the theatre. Director Conrad Nelson should hang his head in shame for electing that hoary old performance style whereby characters engage in conversations with each other, but deliver their lines to the audience. The biggest name in the cast, Steve Huison, just about came away with some dignity intact, but not so Lisa Howard, playing his wife, or indeed any of the other actors who delivered load and unsubtle performances that were just embarrassingly vaudevillian.
As for the politics, it just felt like McAndrew threw a plethora of buzz words like 'Fake News' and 'Me Too' at the script, along with politicians and issues that she clearly has no real grasp of or indeed any message to convey. The play has a weirdly anti-Corbyn agenda that didn't sit well with this Liverpool audience whilst its Brexit gags fell flat. If you find the idea of Huison's beleaguered hubby believing that the EU has decreed that a woman's amniotic fluid should consist of brine and olives and is therefore thankful for Brexit then no doubt you'll be wetting yourselves as much as the 'expectant mother' in question.
I really wish I hadn't paid!
In terms of story and tone, The Navigators, Ken Loach's somewhat overlooked 2001 film, is the kid brother to his earlier film Riff-Raff. Both films are relatively light in tone and deal with the corrosive effects on an industry when management insist you start to cut corners, and both films were written by men who had worked in those industries, making for a deeply authentic and believable atmosphere.
The Navigators was written by first-time screenwriter and former railwayman Rob Dawber, who based it on his own experiences and what he saw as a result of the privatisation of the railways in the mid 90s. Tragically, this film also shares another link with Riff-Raff; like the writer of that earlier film, former labourer Bill Jesse, Dawber died not long after the work on the film was completed, cruelly cutting short a promising secondary career in film. His death from mesothelioma, a rare form of lung cancer, is all the more poignant when you consider it was likely caused by handling asbestos in his work on the railways. As Ken Loach said in Dawber's Guardian obituary, 'working people have lost a champion'. He received a posthumous BAFTA for Best New Writer for the film.
The Navigators follows five railway workers – pragmatic John, young divorcee Paul, cautious Mick, sensitive Jim and union man Gerry – who work in a Sheffield depot affected by the privatisation of British Rail in 1995. The men are informed by their useless and pompous supervisor Harpic (so called because he's 'clean round the bend') one morning that they are now working for a company called East Midlands Infrastructure (and pretty soon after, that company is bought out by another; Gilchrist Engineering, which refuses to recognise all previous agreements made between management and the union) and that from now on they will either be competing with rival track companies or they can take voluntary redundancy. Pretty soon, the gang realise that's not all they're competing against either; as work dries up and agencies dominate the market offering well paid contracts but no job security or adequate health and safety precautions, their backs are against the wall and they're left to contemplate whether the grass is really greener on the other side of the track.
The Navigators is a very funny film filled with an authentic working man's bone dry, witty dialogue that could only ever have been written by a genuine working man. There's a very funny joke that is played across several scenes revolving around the greediness and slow-wittedness of a secondary character, the depot's cleaner, that never fails to have me chuckling, but this lightness of tone effectively hides the darker, more serious undercurrent, making its bite all the more sharper when it strikes. The scene featuring Gilchrist Engineering's slick corporate video, full of empty yet impressive sounding buzzwords is satirically and dolefully amusing at first, but, with hindsight and the poor effects of privatisation apparent to all, we can see just how hollow and insulting such a facile veneer truly is. Worse of all, the film showcases just how damage these private contractors did to the community of the rail workforce, ushering in their dog eat dog methodology that effectively set the industry back a century in terms of workers rights and protection as is shockingly witnessed in the film's final reel.
It's bewildering to think that a gem such as this is all too often overlooked in Loach's cannon. It needs to be seen by more people and will almost certainly be appreciated. It's central message is all the more topical in this world of zero hour contracts and a substandard living wage and, in its central theme of nationalisation being better than privatisation, it should undoubtedly strike a chord with anyone who felt politically energised by Jeremy Corbyn's recent Labour manifesto which pledged the renationalisation of the railways.
