BWW Reviews: GOODBYE BARCELONA, Arcola Theatre, November 28 2011

Barcelona is all Gaudi, Messi and Stag and Hen Party these days, but within living memory, it was the epicentre of a vicious civil war that pitched faction against faction, city against city and brother against brother.

It was there that the ragbag mix of communists, socialists and anti-fascists, who left Britain to join the International Brigades fighting in Spanish Civil War, find a noble place in history as men and women with the foresight, the courage and the cojones to make a stand against the tide of fascism washing over Europe. Though their Spanish cause was lost, their argument was won, and fascism was expelled from all Europe east of Iberia come 1945.

Goodbye Barcelona (at the Arcola Theatre until 23 December) follows the stories of Sammy (Tom Gill), an East End Jewish kid, and his mother Rebecca (Lucy Bradshaw), a widow who always told her son to fight for what he believes in. With that advice in mind and ablaze with socialist rhetoric, high on the beating back of Moseley’s Blackshirts at Cable Street, Sammy joins up to fight the Falange and is soon in Spain, in love and in danger. Rebecca sees that her place in the cause is to act as a nurse and to pursue her son through the battlefields, hospitals and monasteries of a Spain tearing itself apart.  

Judith Johnson’s book packs two parallel, but curiously separate stories, into a musical that also wants to explain the war and pay homage to its heroes, men (and women masquerading as men) condemned to fight Franco’s lavishly supplied (by Hitler and Mussolini – natch) forces with fifty year-old Russian rifles on a diet of beans.

How packed is the book? Well, within half an hour or so, four male and two female characters have been introduced and fleshed out, a lovely patter song has explained the factional in-fighting, and the latest war situation has brought to the masses by the supercharged propaganda of La Pasionaria (sung beautifully by Laura Tebbutt). That’s packing it in!

There’s much to admire in the performances of Mark Meadows as Jack, Sammy’s surrogate father and John Killoran as Ernesto, the anarchist fighter who melts Rebecca’s heart and there’s fine singing throughout, doing full justice to KS Lewkowicz’s mix of anthems, love songs and laments.

Much to admire too in Goodbar Productions desire to throw light on a sometimes forgotten period of European history, especially at a time when internationalism is under threat in Europe. But there’s never quite enough dramatic tension in the plot. From the moment we meet them, the fate of all of the characters is somewhat predictable, with no moments of cowardice nor any real questioning of the cause allowed. Nor do we get a sense of the appeal of the fascists rampaging through the country, as we do so chillingly in Cabaret’s Tomorrow Belongs To Me.

Ultimately, Goodbye Barcelona’s worthy ambition and its enthusiasm to educate and entertain, to make us laugh and cry, to move seamlessly between battlefield and hospital flounders on an unwillingness to portray individuals as alchemies of good and bad, of certainty and doubt, of warmth and coldness.

That said, Goodbye Barcelona’s flaws, like those of the bickering anti-fascist forces in Spain, are the result of good intentions. That such intentions are only partly realised detracts only marginally from a show that stirs emotions and honours the International Brigades’ ordinary, extraordinary, men and women.

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