Review: PLEASE PLEASE ME, Kiln Theatre

We’re fond of a statue in our Liverpool home, exceedingly bare or otherwise, but it took 55 years for Brian Epstein to get his in the place of his birth, if not quite his accent. This new play by Tom Wright goes some of the way to explaining why this most sentimental of cities took so long to recognise one of their own, a rare instance of aligning with an Establishment, that gave him nothing.

The Beatles manager, their business guru, a counterpoint to George Martin, their musical guru and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, their, well, just guru, was an outsider. A gay Jewish businessman, who hid his real self behind the closet door and beneath a voice that, unlike 99% of those with whom he grew up, did not instantly reveal his origins, Epstein instantly identified with John Lennon. He also did not really know who he was, his childhood rent by tragedy, continually pulled this way and that by an overpowering creative imagination but with nowhere for it to go. Game recognised game and a tumultuous six year ritual dance began as the two young men circled each other warily and the money poured in.

This is no examination of the record and merch deals, no examination of the unprecedented critical and commercial acclaim nor an analysis of The Beatles’ cultural impact - unlike in many plays and films of this kind, it’s probably fair to expect its audience to know the backstory. Instead Wright recreates the psychological trauma of a gay man caught in the maelstrom of unthinkable success with no compass, no role models, no therapy available to steer his path through it all.

What is remarkable is not that he was to die so tragically, alone at 32 years of age, but that so many of those within the band’s orbit survived the Sex and Drugs and Rock’n’Roll as long as they did. Of course, being both gay and Jewish loaded the dice even further against his chances of seeing the rollercoaster ride through.

Calam Lynch gives us a young Epstein wrestling with a impossible dilemma, one he never resolved - how can he satiate his desire for back alley assignations with rent boys while being the ‘norm’ son his middle class father, and society at large, demanded? Those diametric pulls on his character were tearing him apart until he found a vehicle for all that pent up energy in Lennon, a man who embraced transgression as much as Epstein feared it.

Lynch delivers a tricky brief. He conjures a man both of his time and of the future - his vision of the business side was as innovative as Martin’s was on the creative side - but he’s also vulnerable and weak in the face of bullies. So many times you find yourself wanting to shout from the stalls, “Don’t do that mate!” to a man with deep intelligence, real charm and a keen sense of judgement in everything except his private life, until you remember that he barely lived long enough to see the partial decriminalisation of homosexual acts in 1967. He never had the chance to be the man he was.

The second most important thing about John Lennon is that he was a bastard, a statement made early and forcefully by Noah Ritter in a swaggeringly cruel portrayal of a genius. It’s easy to forget that character assessment, blinded by the legend, the songs and the assassination, but it’s front and centre here. Ritter’s Lennon fires off the jibes knowing that such was “Eppy’s” infatuation that he could both get away with them and that they would strike home. He also leads him on while sharing a room in Torremolinos - parallels with Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell destructive dependency coming across loud and clear.  

Did anything physical happen between them? It mattered then, legally and socially, but it doesn’t now, so it’s in the playwright’s hands to present it ambiguously and what might once have been a key moment fades, literally and metaphorically, into the dark.

Though Epstein-Lennon axis is the central plot of the play, there’s room for a tremendous performance from Eleanor Worthington-Cox as a feisty, ambitious Cilla Black, checking coats at the Cavern Club and catching Epstein’s eye and ear. Shorn of his blindness away Lennon’s blazing light, he’s more human with the young aspirant singer and her earthiness and humour bring out the best in him, revealing the man he might have been in different times, the self-loathing detuned. Worthington-Cox is just as good doubling as Cynthia, John’s much neglected first wife and we can’t help feeling a bit short-changed that she only sings once.

William Robinson and Arthur Wilson do what they can in cameo roles amidst some extremely nifty set changes under Amit Sharma’s direction. A mention too for Tom Piper’s striking and accurate costumes that flesh out a production that is never less than interesting.  

Whilst it’s understandable that rights issues (I guess) preclude the actual songs (though I certainly caught a hint of “Taxman” and “Tomorrow Never Knows” in the incidental music), there’s not much actual Beatles in the story, the girls screaming very much off set and we never glimpse 75% of the Fab Four. 

One might expect that focusing so tightly on the personal relationship between Epstein and Lennon would lead the story towards a universal moral about the inevitable victims amongst those forced to deny their essential humanity when living under oppression, very much on point for our authoritarian times. Yet somehow, it doesn’t. I suspect that, especially with figures so well known and distinctive as Lennon and Cilla (to a lesser extent, Epstein too), the play is constrained by its iconic figures’ specificity and by performances that bring these individuals so vividly to life. 

It’s perhaps a little harsh to say, but the bigger story - one that needs to be told, right here, right now - is lost a little in the smaller one, because that one is just too big to contain.   

Please Please Me at the Kiln Theatre until 29 May

Photo images: Mark Senior