THE LAST SHIP ★★★½
Glasshouse Theatre, QPAC, April 11
Until May 3
Sting makes his entrance on a hovering platform surrounded by welders and riveters, but this isn’t some early MTV music video. He’s playing a shipworks’ foreman in the north of England, in a self-penned musical, and his presence live on stage in Brisbane gives the shiny new Glasshouse Theatre a very big champagne bottle to smash on its bow.
The Last Ship, which first opened in Chicago in 2014, is the pop icon’s tribute to Wallsend-on-Tyne, the shipbuilding town where he grew up in the 1950s and ’60s and that was hollowed out by closures in the ’80s.
Margaret Thatcher’s war on the unions, and her privatisation of national industries, have been the stuff of great drama, from TV landmark Boys from the Blackstuff to The Full Monty and Billy Elliot. But while the shuttering of a dockyard is the setting of The Last Ship, it doesn’t go very far into the impacts on working people, or how Thatcher’s politics destroyed communities, or indeed (as Sting has suggested in interviews), how the great digital reckoning is coming for all our jobs, too.
It’s more a story about making peace with your past. Which is understandable, as Sting left Wallsend behind after a troubled upbringing to become one of the world’s biggest rock stars, and feels he owes the place. But it’s also about death because, well, he’s now 74.
Sting’s character, Jackie White, receives devastating health news at the same time that he finds out the government has sold the town’s main source of employment. Meanwhile, 30-something sailor Gideon Fletcher (Declan Bennett) returns to his hometown after 17 years to tie up his late father’s affairs and finds he has unfinished business with his teenage flame, local pub owner Meg Dawson (Lauren Samuels).
The musical’s book has been rewritten twice by different writers since its Tony-nominated, but financially unsuccessful, Broadway run. The latest script is by English playwright and novelist Barney Norris, but Norris and director Leo Warner (of London’s 59 Studio) haven’t quite ironed out the show’s dramatic problems.
Those problems include a protracted second act that has about three more songs than it needs, and a climatic ending that takes a long time to get off the docks.
Fans of Sting and The Police should be more than happy though. He’s on stage for a good chunk of the action, gets to sing some of the best material (including the rousing title song), but he still pulls off the magic trick of disappearing into the character. And after all, it’s not as if he hasn’t got decades of acting experience under his belt.
The songs are evocative and clearly his – some with folk underpinnings; others exhibiting the DNA of the composer of Moon over Bourbon Street and Every Breath You Take.
There are strong roles for the women here: among them Annette McLaughlin as the matriarchal Peggy White, and Samuels, a former Elphaba in Wicked – and she sounds like it.
The one who might be feeling a little underserved is Shaggy. The character of the Wallsend Ferryman is a bit of a conceit – a lovable angel of death – but he could still have had some more to do with the story in addition to half a song and the odd throwaway line.
The musical comes to life most vividly in the scene where Gideon visits his late father’s house and sings the rueful Dead Man’s Shoes, a song that deftly fills in the blanks about his past. It’s followed up by The Night the Pugilist Learned How to Dance, a charming how-I-met-your-mother song for the benefit of Meg’s teenage daughter, Ellen (in a sparkling turn by Hannah Richardson).
Against her mother’s wishes, Ellen wants to leave Wallsend and move to London to sing in a band: she’s another Sting proxy. Gideon’s warning to Ellen – “If you leave in the wrong way, you’ll never really go” – is The Last Ship’s aha moment.
There are picket lines, death scenes, bombastic (and boombastic) bits – this is the one that cuts the deepest.
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