Boys from the Blackstuff - Liverpool/NT/Garrick/Tour

Purely speculative of course but the Noel Coward will be free for 15 weeks after 22nd June.

Does anyone know if "Front Stalls" are going to be on stage or lower? Theres also 2 blocks in this section so not sure where best to sit here if anyone can advise?

I don't know why, but if you go direct via the Nimax website they are on sale now.

Saw this yesterday at the matineee with a very engaged local audience (of an age to know the original well I suspect as am I). Graham has done a really good job of taking Bleasdale's individual episode story lines and turning them into a flowing story, though my one nitpick is that this starts to creak a bit in the middle of the second half. He's also made some fairly inspired modifications so it's not just an abridgment.

The cast are uniformly good, the staging really well done, overall it's an excellent production.

The Royal Court is a slightly weird venue with it's stalls "tables for eating" setup but you're close enough in the circle to the stage that it doesn't matter.

And I think if you can manage it, it's genuinely worth it to see this with a Liverpool audience. I suspect some of the ambience will not transfer to London...

Rest in peace, Bernard Hill, the original Yosser Hughes, who has passed away at the age of 79.

2 x tickets for this on the noticeboard for 25th May if anyone is interested before I return for a credit.

Just a heads up… the whole series is being shown next Wednesday night on BBC4.

I’m going to see it tonight, sitting in row FF. I’ll let you know.

Please, thanks.

Also, do these seats obstruct the view of the usual front row seats?

There isn’t any rake whatsoever in the front stalls, so like me maybe you will be unlucky and get the heads of two ignorant idiots in front of you blocking things as they turn to talk sh*te to each other throughout proceedings, so if you were the couple on the right hand end of EE, shame on you, stick to sitting at home watching Gogglebox if your idea of a great night is talking sh*te while you watch something. Otherwise unless you’re sitting in the front row (there’s a high scaffolding used that is wheeled onto stage numerous times) the views are decent but I imagine its an effort to see much sitting more than ten rows back as the whole thing is very poorly lit.

With regards to the actual play, I’m agreeing with Parsleys thoughts on this: not helped by the aforementioned talking twats, I had seriously been considering leaving at the interval myself but thought I would go back for the second half, unfortunately it then descended into some sub Bread/Last Of The Summer Wine attempts at farce and seemed to take an awfully long time to get to the end. It might have been helped with a bigger cast so we don’t get actors playing three or four roles either (I don’t think wigs were the problem, the main issue with hairstyles was the sh*te sub Partridge Family cut sported by ‘Mr. Moss’ : anyone walking round Liverpool sporting that cut in the early 80s would have got a kicking)

My memories of the tv series are very distant (I was about 13 when it first got screened but I remember far preferring Auf Wiedersehen Pet at the time which covers the same time period and class of people) but overall it seemed to be two and a half hours of professional theatrical misery, can’t recommend this.

But in this instance virtually all of the themes are taken beat for beat from Bleasedale's original TV version. Graham has mostly shortened the material (condsiderably), changed the ordering of some elements and simplified a few of the others which wouldn't work on stage. I'm not saying that's a reason why you should like it, just that I think your criticism here about disenfranchised characters is wide of the mark.