Pub Quiz is Life @ Hull Truck

At last! A play on Hull Truck's main stage that doesn't wallow in Hull Victimisation Syndrome.

Richard Bean's Pub Quiz is Life comes as a minor breath of fresh air, after a few shows that have made much of Hull's perceived status (earned or otherwise) as a bit of a rubbish city, where the locals readily admit that the place is awful. Don't get me wrong, this play does have the odd symptom, but HVS is nowhere near the rampant disease it has been. We're talking a minor case of sniffles, rather than the recent bout of flu.

What Bean does instead is much better than the tack taken by Alan Plater and Rupert Creed. He mentioned in an post-show talkback that he thinks playwrights should 'lift up the rock and look at the bugs under it'. Rather than have middle-class, middle-aged folk bemoaning the state of their lives and city, Bean shows people living in that city – not all of them are working-class – and his characters actually do things.

His plot centres around Lee, a discharged squaddie fresh from Afghanistan who joins his father to form a pub quiz team. Also on the team is Woody – the man supplying Lee with cocaine to ease his father's MS – and Melissa, who works for a company aiming to regenerate Hull and make it a 'top ten town'...whatever one of those is. Already, you can see where the HVS symptoms are going to creep in. Oh, and Bunny – Lee's dad – is a retired dock worker. So plenty of chance for the old man to have friction with the young woman over the general state of Hull.

Unlike previous stage fictions of Hull – without wanting to continue comparing Pub Quiz... to other plays – this one manages to make some good points. The shouting about Afghanistan and Britain's right to be in the country may not be necessary, but the loss of fishing as an industry – and the subsequent loss of dignity and purpose for Hull's local male population – is as good a reason as any for the city's current degenerate state, and especially the high number of unemployed. Esther Hall (of BT advert fame) tries her best to make the argument that 'iconic footbridges' and shopping malls are an improvement sound plausible, but it just doesn't stand up to understandable anger. That this is anger Bean shares with the older men of Hull seems a reasonable assumption.

The strength of this production lies in its charting of the gradual corrupting of Lee. He starts off as a nice enough bloke, a married father with an eye for a good-looking lady, getting hold of small amounts of crack to ease his dad's illness. But the world he finds himself in on returning from Afghanistan makes him angry, cuts him off and seemingly rejects his hard-working father. The world – perhaps the nation – turns him into something else, not quite a monster but a feeling of revulsion is hard to avoid by the end. Unless you admire the determination and ruthlessness he exhibits, of course.

Another strong point is the pub landlady, Mabel, who asks the questions in a voice like gravel soaked in honey. She's a bit like Chaucer's Wife of Bath revelling in performing a mini-Cabaret act whilst plucking general knowledge questions from a glorious trail of smut. Picture that. Anecdotes about her eight husbands crop up throughout her questions over the weeks, and every now and then she has a song. And what a voice.

Interestingly, only one of the cast is from Hull, and some of their accents are patchy. Watch out for one particularly bad piece of casting in a drug-dealer played far too young, by someone too young (in a way, that's probably a compliment to the actress – or it would be if her accent were decipherable). Throughout, it feels as though the cast all need to loosen up a bit and relax; there's something to be said for deadpan delivery (see: Mabel) but it gets taken way too far here. The same can even be said of perhaps the worst onstage gunshot in the history of the north.

Tellingly, Bean also declared that he'd wanted a Hull play called 'Craptown', and this was probably it. So, while it's not quite suffering a full-on bout of HVS, there's definitely an acknowledgement of the symptoms...Bunny even complains that Luton got the official title ahead of Hull: “We was robbed!”

Where Bean succeeds is in keeping that a side-issue, and not a focus. Pub Quiz is Life is much more about British society as a whole than poor old Hull, and so much better for it.

'Confessions of a City Supporter' at Hull Truck

Alan Plater's play Confessions of a City Supporter is centred around the story of one man's life like the core that an apple grows around.


As the title implies, Confessions... plays in the city of Hull, chosen as the home of Hull Truck Theatre Company in 1972 because it seemed the least likely place in the Universe to base an experimental theatre company. Also because it was cheap. The Company toured for a few years – not having a permanent venue – until settling in a blue shed on Spring Street, their iconic venue opposite the city's morgue. It was the same year that John Godber joined the Company.


All that moving around between 1972-83 probably gave the Company a good feel for the community there were working in, as – presumably – will the large number of locals that they employ. Nowhere is that community spirit felt more than in Hull Truck's current brochure. A quick flick through it reveals the rather large number of local influences in the first season at the shiny new venue on Ferensway. First Hull Trains, Hull CVS and Hull City Council each get their logos plastered onto advertising for a show. Coming up on the Main Stage are the Youth Theatre's Our Day Out, and a play about Hull's recent flooding, while local Hull College students perform (A Dream Play) this week in the Studio, and both the Humber Mouth Literature Festival and Hull Jazz Festival will have events hosted at the Truck in Summer. The Education/Outreach Department has been renamed Inter@ct (see what they did there?) and there's a whole page on conference options in the theatre.


Then, there's Confessions... itself, which is sponsored by Premiership side Hull City AFC, and is swamped in the community it takes such pains to play to. Audience members turn up to this Help Group show in football strips of varying ages, while one fan tells them about his family's experiences of supporting City (well, the male line's experiences; the women just seem to sit around and give birth every once in a while). It's a play very much at home in its Hull setting, with plenty of opportunity for digs at Grimsby, Leeds or Doncaster (even one at the frankly wonderful Wolverhampton), and isn't ashamed to 'wallow in failure', as one character has it. In fact, failure is almost a communal activity in this case, after all, audience members confess to being City supporters, and are then reassured that there's no shame in that. You see, City have always been cheated – we're told, with ever such faint echoes of other put-upon peoples, like the ever-suffering Irish or the wandering Jews – through the century or so on display here. In fact, the one big victory is celebrated in an overly long bit of singing – they have to make a song-and-dance of what they've got, bless them.


But, alas, there's a lie at the heart of Confessions..., a terrible, self-deceiving lie. It's not for the neglected partners at all. We're told that, at the start – they say there's no point talking to the fans, because they already understand the heartache...no, the play is for the partners who've been neglected down the ages. Thing is, if that were the case, surely those partners would get more stage time than the fans? Not so. This is all about the fans, and about the (male) community in Hull getting behind their team. Not necessarily a bad thing, but a lie, all the same.


Oh, and it doesn't grow out of the story of one man's life. The core is a line of four fathers in the same family.