Review: Taking the Piste at Liverpool's Royal Court ***1/2

On paper, the story of the Kirkby Ski Slope seems wildly improbable – so wild indeed that even those folk at the Royal Court, where no plotline is too outlandish, reportedly thought playwright Kieran Lynn had jumped the shark.

But this is no fictional tale of council corruption and ineptitude, it actually happened. Perhaps it’s only really surprising that it’s taken half-a-century for someone to turn it into a piece of entertainment.

Taking the Piste (not to be confused with John Godber’s On the Piste) revisits the heady days of 1970s local government reorganisation where smaller councils, often fiefdoms, were about to subsumed into larger administrative bodies.

Kirkby was a prime example – the local council dominated by one man, the late David Tempest, who was nicknamed the ‘King of Kirkby’ and who made all the decisions in the borough.

Happily for Lynn, none of the main protagonists in this sorry skiing saga are with us any longer, giving him free rein to take the already incredible facts and put them through the Royal Court blender.

But Taking the Piste isn’t just about the ill-fated leisure facility facing the wrong way next to the M57.

In fact, it's arguable that it’s not even primarily about that and that the debacle is ostensibly a satirical vehicle for considering the role of the media in a healthily functioning society and what happens when the Fourth Estate puts commercial and other vested interests above impartiality and holding power to account.

There’s nothing naturally or immediately amusing in that of course. And these two plotlines, the serious and the ridiculous, aren’t always easy bedfellows, particularly in the first half where they run parallel to each other with lots of panto-esque emoting but, given the raw material, surprisingly few actual big laughs.

Above: The Liverpool Echo features department. Top: Donald Storm (Paul Duckworth), Geoff Ditchwater (Michael Starke) and Sandra Starkey (Holly Mimi Bernice) on the site of the Kirkby ski slope. Photos by AB Photography.

Bombastic council leader Donald Storm (Paul Duckworth in full wild-eyed baddie mode) wants to spend a pot of funding before it’s nabbed by the new Knowsley Borough Council. So he cooks up a plan with his gormless builder crony Geoff Ditchwater (Michael Starke - the hapless Sancho Panza to Duckworth's Don Quixote. Or Corleone in a rather laboured running line) to build a ski slope for the town, making sure costs are minimised so plenty of cash will also find its way into his pocket.

What could possibly go wrong?

Separately, idealistic trainee hack Kelly White (Hayley Sheen) starts a placement in Liverpool Echo features, a department staffed by some very drippy characters, where her determination to report without fear or favour on the things that really matter to the community is derided by the ball-breaking editor Patricia Grimes (Vicky Binns) for whom advertisers and profit margins are the overriding consideration.

Here I should admit to a personal interest. I spent a decade-and-a-half at the Echo, nine years of it in the features team, where my colleagues would have eaten this lot for breakfast.

Binns’ editor is the play’s second panto villain – imagine a foul-mouthed Maleficent. But there are also echoes of Life on Mars' Gene Hunt in her politically incorrect swagger, along with a definite whiff of Spitting Image’s Mrs T savaging the ‘wets’ in her cabinet.

Above: Vicky Binns as editor Patricia Grimes. Photo by AB Photography.

Watching the wets getting savaged is undeniably entertaining, although Patricia never really develops fully from being a cartoon bully. Saying that, there’s something rather magnificent about Binns’ no-holds-barred performance as the monstrous boss laying down the law.

And if you think she sounds extreme in this day and age of HR hand holding and support animals, remember the past was a different country - just ask my friend what her old editor threatened to do to her with a desk stapler.

Fictional characters aside, the real-life Echo itself gets quite the drubbing, although interestingly while the Royal Court audience usually enjoys a bit of fun being poked in that direction, there's no baying of the crowd here.

If the first half feels a bit bogged down in dual scene setting and dominated by two, let's say, exuberant performances, there's a gear change after the interval with the tempo and comedy picking up appreciably as Duckworth and Starke, fully togged up in ski gear, contemplate the hastily constructed ‘Mount Kirkby’ white elephant with growing unease.

Above: Elliott Kingsley as Derek and Hayley Sheen as Kelly. Photo by AB Photography

Meanwhile undeterred, and full of self-righteousness, Kelly and lovestruck reporter Derek (Elliott Kingsley) launch both an investigation into the project - prompted by an anonymous tip off from Storm’s troubled assistant Sandra (Holly Mimi Bernice) - and a new independent publication, the Liverpool Free Press, in which to publish it.

Lynn’s separate story strands become entangled, very enjoyably, as the eager young journos set out to quiz council leader and builder about the nitty gritty of the slope’s construction and the net tightens around the inept and greedy duo.

Talking of the slope’s construction, how to go about representing the towering ‘monument to municipal folly’, as it was dubbed at the time, on a theatre stage?

Designer Jasmine Swan makes good use of the Royal Court’s revolve to keep the action moving from the pubs where Storm does his deals and the journos drink to the Echo newsroom to the site of the ski slope next to a motorway slip road.

And each time the scene rotates into view, we're treated to something new, the site gaining additional debris, matting and finally a sweeping vista of the slope in all its bumpy, weed-strewn glory.