Big Society!, Leeds City Varieties

Phill Jupitus in ‘Big Society!’

The City Varieties in Leeds, Britain’s longest-serving music hall, takes its brief seriously. It is best known for 30 years of hosting the former nostalgia TV show The Good Old Days, and it is therefore fitting that the Red Ladder company’s latest stage collaboration with agitpop merchants Chumbawamba should be “a music hall comedy”. We see a succession of songs, comic sketches and other variety acts such as escapology, magic and even an invisible monkey (it makes a kind of sense in the show, honestly), interspersed with backstage scenes among the performers. The comedian has a crush on the soubrette, the escapologist puts herself into chains as a Suffragette, and everybody resents their common exploitation by the fat, rich manager. As the traditional number has it, “It’s the same the ’ole world over/It’s the poor what gets the blame/It’s the rich what gets the pleasure/Ain’t it all a bloomin’ shame?”

Boff Whalley’s original songs, too, cleave strongly to the show’s agenda that little has changed in terms of class, wealth and power since 1910, when the action is set. The oft-reprised title number parodies the Eton Boating Song to argue how little “we’re all in this together”; the performers are persecuted by the hypocritically moralising yellow press in the person of “The Man From The Double Standard” (who is finally bested in an anachronistic back-light fantasy sequence). Whalley and a quartet of other current and former Chumbas provide period accompaniment including euphonium and banjolele.

Director Rod Dixon marshals a set of rollicking performances led by Phill Jupitus as musical comedian George Lightfeather. Jupitus has the music-hall touch in that he does not excel vocally, but puts his numbers across with flair and assurance. There is something conceptually amiss with a celebration of a raucous, boozy working-class culture that doesn’t finish before closing time, and there is a slight air (appropriately given the Chumbawamba dimension) of tubthumping, but the point is well made, and made in that alas now unfashionable style that unashamedly mixes politics and pleasure.

An equally eloquent demonstration of the argument is that, under the last government, the Varieties received council and National Lottery funding for a refurbishment costing nearly £10m; under this one, Red Ladder has lost 40 per cent of its Arts Council funding.

www.redladder.co.uk