On a Night Like This
Hull Truck Theatre
****
Is John Godber beginning to feel his age? For most playwrights, encroaching years are an opportunity to cultivate a long, white beard and become sage-like. But what if your career has been based on high-octane, knockabout physical comedy? Godber is the genial, big bloke whose work at Hull Truck single-handedly turned theatre into a contact sport. How do you keep that up when you feel a stiffening in the joints and the old knees giving in? What do you do when Bouncers loses its bounce and Shakers begins to look like a case of delirium tremens?
Apparently, you make a big prat of yourself on a bender round Hull. Without identifying Godber's latest creation too closely with its author, there is the bleak chill of lost vitality whistling through this play; and while it's hardly Prospero casting away his books, On a Night Like This feels like a farewell to Godber's early career.
It also suggests that the best of Godber is yet to come: indeed the older, wiser version promises to outstrip the pumped-up, occasionally ham-fisted earlier one. If On A Night _ feels like a young Turk waking up one morning to find himself inside a flabby, 40-year-old body, it is none the worse for it. This has all the best attributes of a night out at Hull Truck - great music, rowdy nightclub scenes, packed house laughing uproariously - but it also deals with a depth and poignancy of character far beyond the ebullient stereotypes of old.
Godber is much tougher on himself these days. Richard, disarmingly well played by James Hornsby, is an excoriating portrait of the artist as an old fart. Rather too comfortable in his nice house and nasty cardigan, Richard ends up with more than he bargained for when he gets the decorators in. This pair of stooges - Leo (Robert Angell), a bit of a hard-case, and Danny (Nick Lane), who has the pinched demeanour of a miserable ferret - are devotees of the Northern Soul scene and soon reconnect Richard with his hedonistic past.
A few years ago, Godber would have written only about one, hilariously embarrassing evening. Now he carries on until events take a distinctly sour turn in the early hours of the morning. Once you left Hull Truck with a spring in your step. After a Night Like This you grope out with fur on your tongue.
Until January 13. Box office: 01482 323638.
