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.

When other audience members respond to reviews

A fellow Blogger known only as The Hessian took offence at my review of Hull Truck's Every Time it Rains, and published a blog slating it. I responded thus:

Well, 'The Hessian', I'm glad you responded to my review and have written your own thoughts out. I hope you don't think my entire blog is offensive (just this review), as some of it is pretty positive. Also, I'm glad you enjoyed Every Time it Rains – it was certainly competently and professionally done, can't fault that, nor the response of the bulk of its audience.

But any review by any critic is entirely subjective, and your opinion will differ from mine. Fair enough.

"This piece, more than any other, celebrates the strength of character displayed
by the people of Hull in the face of great hardship and adversity."

Unfortunately, that's not what I was getting from the piece. Your response is entirely valid, but mine was different. What I was getting from the play was, as you quote, a "torrent of misery". Undeniably, much of the play is far from cheerful.

My review is one where I've tried to make the review feel (as much as I can) like the piece on stage. How well that succeeds is another question. But (and I agree with you here) Creed has injected humour into this play. There are definitely funny moments, and I believe this humour amid misery is a typical human response – and flippancy in the face of tragedy is what is in my review. In a way, that's the point behind what you take to be me commenting "glibly". You've mentioned "they also have better rows", and said that it's not informative or insightful. Perhaps not, but it follows a dash in a sentence, and as such is a little separate from the rest of that sentence ("a much more proactive, materialistic attitude (once the enormity of the situation has sunk in for Gary) – they also have better rows."), it's a casual, throwaway comment, a bit irrelevant and a bit frivolous – like most humour. We tend to use humour as a coping mechanism when life throws something horrible at us (for example, as a child, my response to hearing my nan had died was to laugh; if I laughed, I couldn't cry – though I cried soon after), every funeral I've been to has been full of off-colour jokes and black humour, partly to avoid the grief and the real reason the family has gathered in a graveyard. The humour and flippancy within Every Time it Rains (and, I hope, my review) go some way to demonstrating that point.

I've done something similar with my review of Confessions of a City Supporter, which is mentioned in this review. I don't know if you've seen it, but it's another Hull Truck play based in Hull. In it, the main character claims the play is for non-supporters, which I took to mean dirty non-Hullians like myself (from Wolverhampton, which takes a knock in the play – I was thrilled the place even got a mention outside of the Midlands!)...but it was actually all about the fans. I've no objection to that, but I felt lied to. So, my review has a lie in it, which I reveal at the end, rather like my realisation at the end of Confessions.... These are reviews aiming to convey my reaction to the reader.

You're right to say that the "painfully local...feel" comes from a local writer writing about local people and local events – and if you pick out the main parts of my review (rather than cherry-picking the less positive ones) you can see that I very much admire the work Hull Truck does in producing community-specific pieces of theatre. They excel at that. I've said it before and am happy to say so again:

"[Hull] Truck is very good at this sort of thing. Their shows consistently tap
into the currents of feeling in this community and distil that community onto
the stage. Every Time it Rains has five actors playing a stream of characters,
all in some way affected by The Flood. So it feels like there's a lot of them
onstage, and the almost constant flowing and shifting of characters creates a
real feel of community and of change."

My Confessions... review also has a section highlighting the interaction of Hull Truck's current Programme with the local community - and I hope such interaction continues. But - as an outsider - maybe that's why I struggle with some of their work. Good as it is, it is tailored to the locals, which doesn't include me. That's no one's fault, I just happen to be watching theatre outside of my native city. Big deal. But then, it's not an issue when I see theatre in Birmingham, Edinburgh, Scarborough, Newcastle, Coventry, York or London (which is perhaps a tribute to the Truck's dedication to community work). So, yes, Hull Truck's work does tend to "resonate with with the inhabitants of its surrounding areas", and is often of a "consistently high quality". I'm not denying that. But sometimes you can get a bit sick of hearing about Hull's problems.

Case in point: the audience were asked - at the start of Confessions... – to 'confess' to being City fans, then being told they were 'brave' for doing so. It was hardly brave, in a room full of City fans. Throughout, City fans were shown to be hard done to. Frequently in Every Time it Rains, Hull is shown to be hard done to.
Whatsonstage.com has an interview in which Michael Barnett Snr. says that "It’s the classic thing about Hull thinking of itself as the forgotten city"; Hull on the Hull Truck stage has almost given itself a victim mentality that it doesn't entirely warrant. Barnett then says of Hull, "during the War you couldn’t mention its name because of intelligence.” I suspect that was true of everywhere, not just Hull. I'm afraid they do come across as rather deserving of pity, “poor little Hull folk” as you've quoted me saying.

My comments aren't "dismissive" at all; they're based on much thought on the basis of at least two full-length Hull Truck plays. Also, my review doesn't go so far as to say that the literal people of Hull are actually ""celebrating...self-jubilant victimhood"". What it does stress is that the locals "almost seem to be celebrating it [victimisation], as they sink into self-jubilant victimhood" - not that they have sunk into it, but almost seem to be in the process of doing so. And that's just the onstage Hull, not the literal city.

No, you've a good point: I don't refer to character journeys. But then, for me as an audience member, it wasn't about individual characters. It was about the community in Hull. That's the central thing to this play. Again, "it feels like there's a lot of them [characters] onstage, and the almost constant flowing and shifting of characters creates a real feel of community and of change." As for "the atmospheric lighting, the seamless depiction of the different effects the floods had on the local community, and the gentle use of comedy" – there's only so much I'm willing to fit into a review before I feel it's too long and cumbersome. Especially if I think that something else is more important to a piece's overall effect than the staging, say. Like I've said, it was about the community and The Flood for me. The staging did its job, as did the lighting (though that had its more dubious moments (I concede the saving of the Renault Twingo was inspired)). I've already mentioned the "gentle use of comedy".

Unlike the comedy though, I can't agree that the piano music was gentle. Nor was it especially evocative, for me. It was another occasion where I – as an audience member - felt manipulated, as though I was being told "Now you should feel sad"...as if the untimely death of a young man related by the man who tried to save him wasn't enough. As if a father talking about his son's early death wasn't enough to convey a sense of loss and tragedy to me which - with Martin Barrass playing it – it emphatically was. The piano shouldn't have been needed.

But thank you for expressing what you think. Hopefully, you're less angry than when you posted your critique. I always think that if I'm willing to have my words printed and placed in a public domain, I should be willing to have my name alongside them and be willing to stand by what I've said.
Do let me know when you next see a Hull Truck show – or any show, really – and we can
compare notes, if I've seen it too.

Oh, and "disappointing"?

Every Time it Rains @ Hull Truck

There can only be so many water puns a writer (like Rupert Creed, say) can slip into a script without them being noticed. Surely. But in his new play – Every Time it Rains (having its World Premier at Hull Truck right now) – Creed keeps a gentle trickle of them bubbling up from characters' mouths.

The fact that this is a World Premier at Hull Truck shouldn't come as a surprise; it's got so painfully local a feel, I doubt the Truck staff are exactly swimming in offers to tour it elsewhere. It's not just a story about floods – it's a story about Hull's flood in 2007. The one that the media submerged under stories of other floods around the country, a move followed by government recovery efforts which also focussed elsewhere. It forms part (along with the Truck's recent Confessions of a City Supporter) of a wave of victimisation felt by Hull's locals – they almost seem to be celebrating it, as they sink into self-jubilant victimhood.

But the Truck is very good at this sort of thing. Their shows consistently tap into the currents of feeling in this community and distil that community onto the stage. Every Time it Rains has five actors playing a stream of characters, all in some way affected by The Flood. So it feels like there's a lot of them onstage, and the almost constant flowing and shifting of characters creates a real feel of community and of change. There's the bulky copper who tried to rescue Michael Barnett, failed, and now suffers a life awash with guilt and flashbacks. Then Norman, and his wet drip of a wife, Maureen, whose bungalow doesn't stand a chance against the floodwaters – despite his careful preparations. Their neighbours are Gary and Claire, who have a much more proactive, materialistic attitude (once the enormity of the situation has sunk in for Gary) – they also have better rows. What Creed uses these characters – and other minor ones – for, is telling us all that The Flood was traumatic, people suffered, the systems in place couldn't cope, and no one cared about the poor little Hull folk. Essentially, The Flood results in Creed's characters pouring out an unremitting torrent of misery, each struggling to keep their head above the hassle surrounding them.

So, another Truck play to conform to the two unwritten Truck Rules: 1) All plays must play up to their own nature as theatrical performance, usually by having characters addressing the audience. 2) There must be audience manipulation in the last few minutes. 3) If a play has a distinct appeal to Hull folk, it gets the main stage – ideally, plays should also encourage the idea of Hull folk as put-upon and victimised.

The copper claims to be trying to tell a straightforward story, without saturating it with emotion. It seems to be Creed's intention too. Well, all those speeches dripping in sentimental piano music really put a damper on that!