David Judge is the writer and performer of this autobiographical monologue in which he narrates the early years of his life from the perspective of his adoptive father, Dave.
Judge is mixed race. Dave is white, as is Angela, Judge’s mother. Set in Manchester in the 1980s and exploring class, masculinity and family as much as it does race, SparkPlug is a dexterous and moving telling of the author’s story. There is swaggering bravado one minute and silent, gentle yearning the next.
An elegiac and unassuming poetry is threaded throughout Judge’s performance, not only in the text (“He bounces off the wall, you know. He sends her up them”) but also in the lyricism of Hannah Tyrrell-Pinder’s staging, Katie Scott’s design and Richard Owen’s lighting. Both on stage and in Judge’s narration, objects are tentatively constructed, lovingly laboured into existence before being dismantled or exchanged: cars, Ikea furniture, families. And despite the material trappings of class, it is through the bodies – muscular, dynamic and balletic – that stories are told: the measured exhalation of cigarette smoke, a reassuring hand while Angela is throwing up, Dave’s slow collapse at the sight of unexpected visitors. In Judge’s commanding performance, these are fleeting but exquisitely theatrical moments.
In the latter sections in particular, resorting to a destructive machismo, Dave says and does things that are unpleasant. He is not the flawless hero, as much as he might have appeared so to an eight-year-old’s eyes. But in Judge’s homage, there is at least a reassurance of authorial truth, of his own if not his father’s. And it is beautifully told.
