Anyone remember the biggest concert ever staged in the history of the world? The makers of Just For One Day are banking on it, in this competent but frustratingly shallow reconstruction of Live Aid, which races through its origin story, cranks out its big hits and tells us, among other insights, that we can change the world if we work together.
After a premiere at the Old Vic, the show has moved - tightened, tweaked - to the Shaftesbury Theatre where it ousts Mrs Doubtfire, by the same writer John O’Farrell. He set himself some rules when he was writing this one: it shouldn’t be a straightforward hagiography; it shouldn’t be full of people doing impressions of popstars; and it should be fun. He pushes all three rules to breaking point.
The framing is that mum Suzanne (Melissa Jacques) is seeing her Gen Z daughter Jemma (Fayth Ifil) off to university to study history - cue jokes about how kids today don’t understand what cassettes are - and thrusts a copy of a Live Aid picture book in her hands. The teenager-written-by-a-middle-aged-man scoffs and rolls her eyes, and then mum tells her the story of why Live Aid was actually really important actually.
Dreamy reminiscences follow from 20 cast members who sit on Soutra Gilmour’s bleacher set, the (rather excellent) rock band behind them, as if plucked straight out of Wembley.
Bad dialogue follows too, with a patronising tone that whiffs of 1980s educational theatre or a bad episode of Grange Hill, which makes you wonder who it’s aimed at.
And Bob Geldof also follows, big time. Chest puffed out, leg cocked and rooster-like, Craige Els nails the impression, his Geldof pecking at the power and indolence around him, and there are plenty of entertaining moments as he guilts celebrities into taking part. It’s his clash of optimism and realism that roots the show, his insistence that ‘popstars can’t eliminate poverty’ set alongside his desperate need to give it a bloody good go. But we do have to endure many times the same joke about how much he swears.
Of the other superstars involved in Live Aid, it’s only Midge Ure (a very convincing and, astonishingly, unrelated George Ure) and Margaret Thatcher (Julie Atherton) who get stage time. We’re told (as we’re told a lot of things in O’Farrell’s less than subtle script) that the ordinary people who helped put Live Aid together are the real heroes. The show doesn’t follow that through: we only get to know one of them, Suzanne, who sells lots of copies of Do They Know It’s Christmas. The whole show has this problem, of ideas left half-baked, characters underdeveloped. Always, it returns to Geldof (he swears, did you know).
One moving scene opens up the problem that the money raised from Band Aid wasn’t getting to people; cartels were stealing it, inflating the prices, people were still dying. We’re never told how that problem was addressed. The teenager-written-by-middle-aged-man is there to be the woke thorn in the side of the reminiscing boomers - actually there is snow in Africa, actually this whole thing is quite problematic - but it’s all very simplistic.
The cast perform well, given little to do as actors, but allowed to shine during the very loud (and, yes, very good) songs. You get the sense of a rehearsal room full of people shouting ‘MORE REVERB!’. Those familiar songs are given exciting new life in arrangements by Matthew Brind, working better when they stray further from the original, like a blowaway rendition of Blowin in the Wind, chant-like and howling.
Anyone desperate for a show about the story of Live Aid will enjoy getting exactly that. All the big hits are here, a few laughs, some serious bits and one genuinely moving moment when Geldof visits Ethiopia. But it’s stuck with the same problems that Live Aid had 40 years ago. As with Geldof, you can’t deny its good intentions. 10% of ticket prices are going to the Live Aid Charitable Trust and, throughout, there’s this undercurrent of ‘it’s better to do something than nothing’. It’s just a shame that the something they’re doing is this.
