Boys from the blackstuff has been brought to the stage and it is still chilling

ALAN BLEASDALE'S 1980S DRAMA ABOUT MASS UNEMPLOYMENT HAS BEEN ADAPTED BY SHERWOOD AND DEAR ENGLAND WRITER JAMES GRAHAM 08:14, 21 May 2025 Boys from the Blackstuff was water cooler TV

before water coolers were a thing - a state of the nation drama that pinpointed mass unemployment as the issue that dominated UK society in the early 1980s. I was 10 when Blackstuff was

first broadcast and the BBC series was the talk of my school playground, mainly because a number of people get headbutted and one of the characters had a particularly memorable catchphrase.

It would be years before I realised that the series' undoubted humour gradually gave way to a bleak depiction of the impact of joblessness on ordinary men and women. Now Alan

Bleasdale's series has been adapted for the stage by Sherwood, Quiz and Dear England writer James Graham, coming to the Theatre Royal on a national tour. That transition from TV to

stage is not without its challenges. The difficulty of that change is particularly acute in the first half of the play, when the intimate and claustrophobic scenes from the television, and

the slow unravelling of the characters, are lost to more action-based and ensemble pieces. But the spirit of the original drama comes through more after the interval as the stories of George

- the nearest thing we have to a beacon of hope - and Yosser Hughes, who spirals beyond all control, play out movingly. The weaving of George's funeral with scenes at the job centre

highlights how the characters lives and deaths have become absorbed entirely by their lack of work. Blackstuff is very much a period piece, and could not be set any time other than 1982. The

mass unemployment that blighted the characters' lives at that particular time has not been a thing for some time. But there are echoes of current times too and universalities in the

play. There are still people today like the Boys who are economically marginalised and have slipped through what we would like to think is society's safety net. Poverty has changed but

certainly hasn't gone away. Article continues below This stage adaptation does not work 100% but is a decent stab at giving new life to Bleasdale's important drama. Perhaps the

greatest compliment I can pay it is that I returned home to see if the original TV series was on iPlayer (it isn't) or available on DVD (it is). The staging that captures scenes around

Liverpool is imaginative and there is some fine acting in the main roles, notably George Caple as Chrissie, Jay Johnson as Yosser, Ged McKenna as George and Mark Womack as Dixie. I am

pleased to report too that the Desperate Dan line of the original series - probably one of the finest, if most bleak, jokes of the 20th century - is retained.