Alan Bleasdale is older than the Radio City Tower and, in many people’s eyes, he is a more enduring Liverpool monument. Right now he’s telling a story he says he has not told in at least 40 years. The reclusive 78-year-old writer is sitting next to his collaborator, the playwright James Graham, by the window of a Chinese restaurant in Liverpool’s docklands.
Since September they have been staging an adaptation of Bleasdale’s masterpiece, the 1982 BBC drama Boys from the Blackstuff, at the city’s Royal Court theatre. It’s now on tour — first at the National Theatre then the Garrick in London. Outside, it’s a coarse, chilly, lightless spring day. The Mersey is as grey as concrete.
We are talking, appropriately enough, about ghosts. Blackstuff, the tale of five unemployed Liverpudlian blokes wheedling, scheming, bantering and losing desperately hard as the scenery of Britain’s clapped-out postwar economic consensus collapses around them, is imbued with the ghosts of the city’s industrial past.
The show has lost none of its angry power, or its humour in the face of bleak odds, in its transition to the stage. With its industrial colours, echoing container ships, string vests and dole queues, the original Blackstuff Britain of 1982 looks like a country that finished fighting a major war a few days before, not several decades ago. Liverpool today, a riotous buzzing party city plagued by thirsty hen dos, is almost unrecognisable.
Almost. What Graham, 41, calls “the human cost of an economic experiment” — Thatcherism, in other words — lingers on. The demand for the theatrical Blackstuff, which has been a success, wouldn’t be so strong otherwise.
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Bleasdale says Blackstuff was like nothing else in his career. He received 7,000 letters during its run. He ended up on Wogan, Parkinson and Desert Island Discs, then filmed an episode of This Is Your Life. Blackstuff also made stars of the actors Michael Angelis and Julie Walters, not just its creator. And Yosser Hughes, an “off his cake” father of three with a wicked headbutt, played by Bernard Hill, became a symbol of the 1980s. He embodied a desperate city and a country where three million people didn’t have work. His plea — “Gizza job, I can do that” — became a national catchphrase.
Bringing the characters and their stories to the stage, as Graham has with such skill and verve, is not just a revival. It’s the past returning to a changed present: a haunting.
“Yeah, I’ve seen dead people,” Bleasdale says, his deep black eyes widening in his craggy face. If there were candles on the table they would have flickered. “The main courses aren’t even here yet,” Graham says, joking, and staring at a prawn dumpling.
In 1975, before Bleasdale achieved a glorious hat-trick early in his writing career (his first novel, stage play and television drama were all produced), he lived for a time with his wife, Julia, on the remote Gilbert and Ellice Islands in the western Pacific Ocean (now known as Kiribati and Tuvalu), working as a teacher.
Their home was next to a coconut plantation. One night the couple heard their young boy crying. “Then we heard the sound of another baby crying in that same room, where there was only one child,” he recalls. Bleasdale went into the room. He had goosebumps.
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“Our boy said, ‘Big man daddy, big man in the cupboard, big man with knife’, and he pointed at the wardrobe.” But there was nobody inside. The next day Bleasdale discovered that the owner of the coconut plantation had accidentally dropped his baby boy from one of the 70ft-tall trees and killed him. The man then slit his throat with the knife he used to cut coconuts down. Bleasdale tells the story the way he writes them, passionately and humanely, with a thumping rhythm. “F***ing hell,” Graham says, possibly thinking about the machete.
He first met Bleasdale — “the person who is responsible for me becoming a writer because of his work” — six years ago at this restaurant. Graham, spruce and poised where Bleasdale is shaggy and intense, remembers watching 9pm dramas such as Bleasdale’s GBH and Jake’s Progress on Channel 4 with his mum, whom he later had the “great joy” of introducing to Bleasdale. Graham has turned up at the Chinese with a carefully bagged bottle of whiskey for him.
The affection is genuine. Graham dotes on Bleasdale, who suffers from illnesses that affect his mobility and his sight. He lovingly spoons a deep fried king prawn on to his hero’s plate.
Before Graham turned up, adapting Blackstuff for the stage used to be a “running gag” in Bleasdale’s life. Theatres asked him to do it. His agent shouted at him. But he didn’t think it could be done.
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Enter Graham, linked up with Bleasdale through the director Kate Wasserberg.
“What he’s done to it fascinates me,” Bleasdale says, laughing. “I’m sorry I can’t help it. This small boy from Nottinghamshire, this young man who has not lived through the things that we lived through, has understood them as deeply as he did.”
Maybe it was the city. Graham likes the idea, as one of his characters puts it in Sherwood, that places remember things. Liverpool does. “I sympathise with all of Liverpool’s struggles,” Graham says. “But I’m still envious of it. I think no matter what hits it, Liverpool knows what it is.”
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While the city may not be as rough as it was in the 1980s, there is still hardship, what Bleasdale calls “psychological ghosts”. Graham finds it liberating: “We have been in this shite before, and then we got out of this shite, and now we are back in this shite.”
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We can get out again, he thinks. He hates the idea of an audience ever leaving the theatre with their “heads down”. Bleasdale says Graham has located “hope”, in the material that he didn’t know was there.
The double act make sense. Graham says he “copied and borrowed” from Boys from the Blackstuff for Sherwood (“It’s slightly worrying I never noticed,” Bleasdale says), going as far as casting Bleasdale regulars such as Lindsay Duncan in it. “I wanted it to feel like an Alan Bleasdale drama,” Graham says. Robert Lindsay, another Bleasdale favourite, has just been cast in Sherwood’s second season.
Bernard Hill, the actor associated with Bleasdale more than any other, died aged 79 a few days before our lunch. A memorial photo of Hill as Yosser, in a clerically black overcoat, black shirt and black boots, with his face as pale as the moon, stared out from the front page of The Times. “A testament to Alan’s creation,” Graham says.
The Royal Court paid tribute to Hill all week. There was a “real response” from the audience, says Bleasdale, who has been thinking about Hill for days now. The first time he saw Hill on stage, he thought: “Oh God, who is this?!” In the late 1970s Liverpool’s theatres were a testing ground for talent such as Antony Sher, Julie Walters, Jonathan Pryce, Pete Postlethwaite, as well as a lackadaisical sounding Bill Nighy (“He couldn’t act then,” Bleasdale says, laughing. “He learnt how to act after he left”) — but it was Hill who burnt the brightest, particularly as a “mesmeric” Macbeth.
Bleasdale wrote Yosser’s scenes over two nights and three days without stopping. “I wrote them with the fury and pace that Yosser was living his life with.” You can tell how deeply he felt it all. Somehow Bleasdale was able to access the mental state of a man whose wife had left him, without a job, and juggling three mute, scared children. “There’s Method acting. Sometimes there’s Method writing too.”
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There is a wildness in Bleasdale that is not present in Graham. He has been writing since the 1970s, although he’s still not properly understood. He is tagged as a “social realist”, yet he has seen ghosts. He is called a “Liverpool writer”, but he rejected the freedom of the city once because he was actually born in Huyton. (“I could see Liverpool from my house,” he says.) There are few television masterminds of his stature around any more, but he has had only one show on the BBC in the past 20 years.
He doesn’t mind. Like Graham, he loves being a writer. So much better than being an actor facing an audience. “At least if you write a load of shite you can always hide it.”
Graham has to go. He has launched yet another play, Punch, in Nottingham. He’s also pondering the state of the nation. Both men are Starmer-curious. Bleasdale because he thinks the Labour leader will become more radical in power, Graham because “any change is better than no change”. Neither of them had much love for Jeremy Corbyn. Bleasdale was aghast when swathes of the north turned Conservative blue in 2019. He worried “about the judgment of my fellow man, if they couldn’t f***ing see Johnson coming”. He shakes his head. “But then again, Elvis Presley didn’t see Colonel Parker coming.”
Bleasdale clambers into a taxi. He points out the Adelphi Hotel, then some of the original Blackstuff locations. More ghosts. They are everywhere if you look hard enough.
Boys from the Blackstuff is at the National Theatre, London SE1, until Jun 8, then transfers to the Garrick Theatre, London WC2, Jun 13-Aug 3. All episodes of Boys from the Blackstuff will be shown on BBC4 on May 29
