Review: Britannia Waves the Rules at the Hope Street Theatre *****

Playwright Gareth Farr’s searing and lyrical Britannia Waves the Rules first roared on to the stage a decade ago, its damaged protagonist Carl Jackson bouncing off the walls of Manchester’s Royal Exchange.

Farr had won the 2011 Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting with this fast, fierce and furious look at the seismic effect of conflict on soldiers and what happened when they returned home.

It was written during the height of British military deployment in Afghanistan, when troop numbers peaked at 9,500 and in a year when 46 were killed. But in many ways, Britannia Waves the Rules is – depressingly - a tale as old as time, with servicemen (and latterly women) hollowed out by war simply expected to return to civvy street and pick up where they left off.

We first meet Carl (Jim Kelly) not in the arid landscape of Helmand province but in the dreek, declining Lancastrian resort of Blackpool.

Carl loathes everything about, and practically everyone in, his hometown from its rain-soaked streets and beach to the ‘mock Mancs’ who peddle drugs to inhabitants without hope and even the members of his own family who seem content to moulder quietly in its candyfloss embrace.

Blackpool is ‘Alcatraz town’ where, in a potent and poetic urgent opening monologue with more than a hint of John Cooper Clarke, we're told ‘a job is a wage, and a wage is a cage in a town like mine’.

The teenager is filled with impotence, impatience and burning resentment, and a roiling, testosterone-fuelled rage that he seeks to self-medicate not with the gear flogged by the local plazzy Appleton twins but with physically punishing runs along the seafront.

He pushes away those who try to get too close or be too nice - including local hot girl Goldie Shaw (Amy Hope Thompson) and has a monosyllabic relationship with his father (Robert Kavanagh) who is just as broken by circumstance (a family tragedy whose ripples underscore everything) but has chosen to take refuge in tea and model trains, and with an uncle (Connor Wray) who finds his solace in beer and the Legion.

Above: Jim Kelly as Carl. Top: Carl (Kelly) with the Appleton twins (Harry Clark and Amy Hope Thompson). Photos courtesy of Off the Gound Theatre.

When Carl is offered the chance to escape and ‘see the world’ as part of the British Army, he resolves to seize the opportunity. But ultimately, it’s just another kind of Alcatraz for the troubled young man who gets plenty of the structure he’s craving but none of the support he needs.

At the heart of this tremendous new production by Wirral’s Off The Ground theatre company, directed by Dan Meigh and Charlie Prothero and playing at the Hope Street Theatre until tomorrow, is a hugely powerful performance from Jim Kelly as Carl.

Kelly’s is a tour de force tour of duty as the human explosive device waiting to detonate, a ‘turbulent vortex’ like the whistle his father gives him as a parting gift and talisman. He visibly throbs with barely suppressed anger and the conflicted emotions of defiance and vulnerability in what is an utterly compelling performance.

Carl’s forerunners are the angry young men of late 50s/early 60s literature and film, and Britannia Waves the Rules in particular echoes Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long Distant Runner – as well as treading the ground gained by RC Sheriff’s potent Great War drama Journey’s End.

Above: Carl (Jim Kelly) and Andy Appleton (Harry Clark who also plays Bilko). Photo courtesy of Off the Ground Theatre.

Kelly certainly puts in the miles in the 90-minute straight-through drama, and with the aid of a clever bungee-style device which sits unobtrusively upstage on the theatre’s empty black box space. Is Carl running from something, or towards something? Perhaps it's both.

He is also the fulcrum around which there are a series of very good performances from other members of the six-strong cast, including Harry Clark as fellow recruit, the laidback 'Bilko', Carl's best - and possibly only - mate in the 1st Duke of Lancasters and with whom he's delployed to Afghanistan.

Their Boys’ Own adventure is halted in sudden and harrowing fashion. But in the world of Farr’s British Army it turns out there’s no battle plan that allows for sentiment, reflection or empathy.

Britannia Waves the Rules is one of the most powerful plays you'll see on a Liverpool stage this year. It's just a shame it's theatrical deployment is so short.