The Glee Club - Library Theatre - 23/09/08 by Alex Beaumont

Summer 1962, and Colin (Robert Emms) is labouring in a coal pit in South Yorkshire. It’s a tough job - dirt, danger and unscrupulous management all make the working day that bit more difficult. But on Sunday evenings he scrubs off the coal dust, puts his pint pot on top of a piano and sings his heart out with the pit’s Glee Club, a ribald gang of hard-working men who gather to drink and harmonise, in anticipation of the big summer gala.

At its heart, Richard Cameron’s The Glee Club is a story about the complex, changing face of masculinity at the middle of the twentieth century. While scurrilous with the lads, Scobie (John Elkington) dotes on his three daughters and cares diligently for his wife, who is pregnant with their fourth. Walt (Jack Lord) tortures himself for sending his son to a care home after the death of his wife, while Philip (Andrew Whitehead) struggles to conceal a secret from the community which might force him into exile.

Jack (Stephen McGann) leads his marriage into a crisis which enrages Bant (Philip Cox), who was spurned by a woman he took for granted and is reduced now to drinking and raging, charging from comedy to pathos in the blink of an eye. And then there’s Colin himself, whose relationship with a village girl poses serious challenges to his dreams of stardom.

Staging the play is a difficult task, especially given the modest space of the Library Theatre, but director Roger Haines does a wonderful job, maintaining a fast pace with dynamic staging and quick scenery changes. The actors perform admirably, too: especially Cox, who perfectly captures Bant’s self-destructive mixture of comradely honour and booze-fuelled frustration.

John Elkington also deserves mention as Scobie, the family man who reveals himself to be a bigot of the most unpleasant kind, and will probably vote for Maggie in twenty years’’ time, thereby turfing himself - and his mates - out of their jobs. The singing is uniformly excellent and the play’s comic moments are played to their full anarchic potential.

Objections could be raised: it’s rather awkward in structure and the denouement fails to have any substantial impact, despite (or perhaps because of) a highly sympathetic portrayal of the ensemble. Moreover, its nostalgia and fatalism are puzzling, as the kind of straightforward working-class masculinity it eulogises never really existed straightforwardly, and there’s plenty of reason to argue that the men - with the exception of Philip - are the architects of their own misfortunes.

But these complaints do not change the fact that The Glee Club is a great production, with a point: endearing, hilarious and frequently touching. It’’s a rowdy affair, and an enjoyable one.