When John Godber returns to Hull, Hull turns out. From 1984 to 2010, the writer-director’s name was synonymous with the city, where he created populist and popular plays for the Hull Truck company. Plays that reflected the lives of local people. But Godber’s local is not parochial – he is one of the most-produced English-language playwrights in the world(alongside Shakespeare and Alan Ayckbourn). His ordinary, working, redundant or unemployed characters are internationally recognisable: people who struggle with everyday pressures – money, work, family; people who pay the price for financiers’ failures and politicians’ finagling; people who are condescended to, misrepresented or ignored by most mass media.
One such character in Godber’s new play, This Might Hurt, is Bet, actor Jack’s 82-year-old aunt and only living relative. When Jack (Robert Angell) is admitted to hospital outside Hull, Bet (Angell again, in a headscarf) visits him twice a week, catching six buses to make the 144-mile round trip. If Jack is awake when Bet arrives, she delivers blunt, repetitive, no-nonsense remarks and non sequiturs (“Always got a pomegranate on me”). If he is sleeping, Bet sits by his bed until visiting is over, then ups and away without a word.
This Might Hurt is based on real events. As Jack declares, in a Godber-style fourth-wall demolishing beginning: “Everything happened.” Jack is discharged. Bet falls ill. Jack cares for her at her home. The story Jack tells shows the NHS at its best and worst: simply, effectively. A medley of 27 characters (feckless patients, belligerent carers, cheery nurses, doctors communicative and uncommunicative, as well as radiologists and consultants) populate a series of scenes illustrating many facets of a system straining to breaking point. All are played with zest by two young Hull-trained actors, Rachael Abbey and Josie Morley. The characters’ situations are both hilarious and heartbreakingly recognisable (not least because of spot-on language – demotic or jargon-riddled). Like Bet herself, the result is funny, no-nonsense and moving without being maudlin. I did not cry alone.
On Godber’s watch, Hull Truck hosted diverse visiting companies, from Complicite to the National Theatre, and gave a platform to smaller, local companies, such as verbatim specialists Remould (the company’s latest director, Mark Babych, is offering a similarly rich brew). Godber is one of the artists who inspired the enthusiasm that gave Hull the edge in the competition to become 2017’s UK City of culture. Personally, I do not get along with all of Godber’s plays (see reviews, passim); I do admire unreservedly what he has done for theatre in Hull and beyond. The prospect of Hull celebrating 2017 City of Culture without him is unimaginable, but at the moment it seems to be a reality.
• At the Stephen Joseph theatre, Scarborough, 14-19 November
