Review: No One Will Tell Me How to Start a Revolution at the Unity Theatre ****

Liverpool playwright Luke Barnes’ No One Will Tell me How to Start a Revolution is a furious and often intensely funny exploration of working-class identity, social (im)mobility, class prejudice and quashed potential.

It started life almost a decade ago in the leafy and decidedly middle-class north London enclave of Hampstead. And while the theatre there has a longstanding reputation as a bastion of new writing, this latest incarnation (one night only - but with the hope of a longer afterlife) feels particularly at home at the Unity, this summer celebrating its history as a crucible for challenging politically and socially conscious work.

Sisters Suzie, Edwina and Lucy are uprooted from their big city council estate and relocated to an affluent nearby town (Formby the immediately identifiable candidate for Liverpool audiences, the squirrel reference a giveaway) by their hard-working roofer dad who aspires for something more for his daughters, despite the financial stretch it entails.

At home in their new - rented - Victorian semi there’s the huge pressure of fulfilling his expectations and not squandering the family's sacrifice, a domestic setting complicated by the absence of a nurturing maternal figure, their unwell mother merely a shadowy background figure.

The lively siblings arrive at their new school nervous but excited, and determined to seize the opportunity they have been given and ‘find themselves’, but they soon discover there are seemingly insurmountable forces ranged against them in what is ultimately an unequal battle.

It's admirable that all three retain some vestige of hope for as long as they do in the face of hostility (the pejorative 'chav' a simmering constant), ostracisation and, after being taken advantage of, ultimately rejection.

When eldest Suzie (Mary Savage), the most muted of the trio, is spurned attempting to make friends with another outsider, it drives her to ignore the sniggers and cruel jibes and reinvent herself in an attempt to win acceptance and make her dad proud.

Combative and cynical middle child Edwina (Faye McCutcheon) deliberately plays the ‘mad’ class clown to get in with the lads who hang around in a disused warehouse after school, but she finds things soon spiral out of control.

Meanwhile clever youngest Lucy (Kathleen Collins) is convinced being intelligent and pretty will win her acceptance, particularly when she snags the best-looking boy in town and becomes hopelessly devoted to him, forsaking all else – only to discover too late that there's a less than noble motive behind his actions.

Above: Suzie (Mary Savage), Edwina (Faye McCutcheon) and Lucy (Kathleen Collins) in No One Will Tell me How to Start a Revolution. Top: Collins, McCutcheon and Savage as the three sisters. Photos by Alan Blundell Photography.

These are young women – no, actually scrap that, these are CHILDREN – who are let down; by the system, by society, and also by the adults around them, including parents and teachers, whose role is to support, protect, nurture and guide them.

With only the exhortation to make it work from their emotionally and physically absent dad, who can really blame them if despite herculean efforts they eventually run out of fight and end up conforming to/confirming the stereotypes assigned to them by others?

If all that sounds rather bleak, then you’re right, it is. But No One Will Tell me How to Start a Revolution is also often gloriously funny and not a little ribald.

This is in part due to the inherent liveliness of Barnes’ writing but it's also down to the three-strong cast who are absolutely electric under Joey Colasante’s energetic direction, their characters exuding a raw, boisterous energy and a captivating lifeforce – albeit one which is slowly ground down by circumstances.

The fourth wall-breaking storytelling has a compelling rhythm and almost poetic quality to it, particularly in the early stages.

It’s just a shame there's a lack of nuance around the middle-class community which populates the narrative, its component characters blending into one awful amorphous whole to create a two-dimensional baddie whose depiction might, one suggest if one were playing devil’s advocate, be a kind of class snobbery all of its own.