If You Kiss Me, Kiss Me - Young Vic

Cunnilingus, cheerlessness and conservatism – this really is one hell of a show. It’s not my kind of music – I must confess I find The Smiths the most insufferable band – yet here, belted out by Horrocks with passion and fury and set in a context that gives them such meaning, the songs had a political as well as a musical prescience. Horrocks, naturally, is a tremendous singer whose love for the songs is clear in every passionate performance, but this is far far more than merely a gig of her greatest hits. It’s a cleverly constructed, politically important Janus of a show, looking back to look forwards and making a striking political point amid the rocking concert setting.

In some ways, Horrocks herself is not the focus – she has a brief spiel at beginning and end, and other than that sings songs to which the dancers perform. The plots instead focus on our four dancer protagonists – extremes of 80s lifestyles opaquely told through wonderful dance to apathetic lyrics. As Horrocks belts out The Human League’s ‘Empire State Human’, one man pumps weights incessantly, as a reminder of the macho man action movies suggested. Dancing the Macarena to Joy Division’s ‘Isolation’, the central oxymoron of the 80s club scene – that people dance alone to be together – is literalised very wittily. A Morrissey song is sung, before which the man and the woman rolled together into the one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation, as Horrocks sings “I just want a lover like any other/I’m in distress, I need a caress” – casual sex is a matter of course, as opposed to something meaningful, the moves and many positions far from Morrissey’s florid bad sex (“the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it whacked and smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone”) but as mechanical as the Macarena. One man first tentatively, then comfortably fumbles about with another man, the politics of Stonewall somewhere distant in the background as human feelings come first here. The miserable repetition of domestic life – in and out comes the fridge, school is tedium, work is tedium and home life is tedium – is a montage that works, given the miserable tone of most northern love songs. If this is an exercise in archaeology, what these various tableaus tend to do is recreate the youthful mood of the 80s; as a 90s band would later sing, our protagonists dance and drink and screw because there’s nothing else to do, and just as Planer, Ryan, Edmonson and the late great Mayall, they live in surreal situ together. As a recreation it’s on the button. But there is much more to this than merely being an exercise in archaeology. These are love songs, and the stories are nominally those of love (comfy home life, casual sex and youthful explorations), but these northern songs are steeped in the politics of the time, and it is here that the production pushes itself into something really quite remarkable.

Over the action presides the wonderful Jane Horrocks like the ghost of Conservatism yet to come. She casts a wry eye over proceedings, performing the songs with a slyness in her voice as if to warn the 80s characters of how little would change in 30 years. This is most clear when the 5’2 Horrocks belts out “Tall, tall, tall, I wanna be tall, tall, tall” with a knowing, self-mocking irony, but this knowingness goes through all the songs, with a far more political and far more pointed edge. Her brief archaeology-invoking introduction locates her (and us) in the present, and the pointed date she later states – 1978 – is, of course, the year before Thatcher’s election, setting the political scene. As such these are more than domestic love songs – they are retrospective political statements about Thatcher’s turbulent decade. The dissatisfaction and apathy the songs had then is clear through performance, but in setting the scene today looking back to yesterday, that apathy is given context and consequence – apathy then changed nothing, only encouraged apathy now. Scenes of work and school – clichés in movies (think Gregory’s Girl or Ken Loach) are set to songs about being alone and danced with dissatisfaction. ‘My New House’ – sung with an ever-increasing sarcasm in Horrocks’ voice over projections of overlapping and overlapping and overlapping house blueprints and similarly overlapping scenes of matter-of-fact f***ing – becomes, in one fell swoop, a parody of the Young Ones’ communal house and a barbed attack on Thatcher’s changes in social housing, which can only remind us of the headlines we read about the housing crisis today. Most affecting is the absence of the gay character – before this song, seen bloodied as if beaten, left alone by his friends and clearly shaken and unwell – who leaves the stage bare to let Horrocks sing ‘I Know It’s Over’; as Horrocks’ shaky voice on an empty stage begins “Oh mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head”, this song about mortality, being alone and the consequences of love gains a distressing poignancy it never had before, the AIDS crisis told not through major statistics and medical knowledge but that heartbreaking human loneliness that still means for loneliness today. At the end, Horrocks brings us to the present with ‘Life is a Pigsty’, Morrissey’s message of misery showing how little has changed, both in politics and apathetic attitudes towards. The relationship between the songs, the performances and the context makes this a profoundly political work, about the reasons there were to be apathetic in the 80s, the desperation for love, and the consequences of apathy today; this is not just a recreation of but a judgement of the 80s and a study of its legacy.

But amidst this apathetic reappraisal of already apathetic songs, there’s something more – something truly touching, truly personal, truly affecting about the way Horrocks structures this all, the plot it tells and the underlying message about love amidst politics, with a pulse as pounding in its romantic heart as in its punky spunky baselines. As Horrocks parades through the stage, she allows herself the odd lusty look at male beauty, the odd dance, the odd moment of interconnectivity. Her final musical choice might, in its chorus, hammer home the grimness the songs also explore – ‘Life Is A Pigsty’ – but its final words of “Even now, in the final hour of my life, I’m falling in love, again” are lines of hope against hopelessness and, cliché though it may be, love conquering all. If You Kiss Me Kiss Me may primarily be a rocking, passionate and wry look at how little political apathy and youthful optimism did then to negate the former and encourage the latter, but above all, as Larkin used carved rock to prove, Horrocks uses Northern Rock to prove our almost instinct almost true: what will survive of us is love.

So, perhaps I’m still high on Joey’s leftover horse tranquilisers from the New London Theatre the adrenaline of seeing Stephen Sondheim, and a part of me thinks I’m talking out of my bottom and probably reading too much into something that’s just meant to be a gig (great gig), but in direct contrast to n1david, surprising no-one more than myself, and for only the second time this year (the first being The Encounter), it’s a full five stars.