The first word ever spoken on the New Vic stage was “Yes”. The affirmation came at the start of a poem by Arthur Berry, written in 1986 to toast the new theatre and welcome audiences to a place of “necessary illusions”. In his native Potteries, Berry is a celebrated polymath, known for his drawings, prints and watercolours, as well as poetry, broadcasting and half a dozen plays, including St George of Scotia Road, the theatre’s opening production.
Appropriately, in this centenary year of Berry’s birth and three decades after his death, the theatre has dug out the first draft of his final play, spruced it up and given it a belated debut.
It is unlikely anyone would consider Whatever Happened to Phoebe Salt a neglected classic. Drawn with the same broad strokes and warm human eye as the sketches that line the upper foyer walls, it is a kitchen-sink drama, evoking the long-lost life of working-class Card Street, Burslem, where the pulse of a pugmill sets a relentless rhythm and the wafer-thin walls permit no secrets.
Berry writes with a sense of bittersweet nostalgia: think Terence Davies’s Distant Voices, Still Lives with the intensity, violence and poetry dialled down. His characters are trapped by circumstance, their lives made smaller by the need to survive.
There is Nellie Salt (Laura Costello), washed out and broken, her hopes of betterment dashed by teenage pregnancy. There is her husband, Sammy (Alasdair Baker), gruff and taciturn, his emotions reserved for the care of the pregnant sow he keeps. And above all, there is Phoebe Salt (Isabella Rossi), the “daughter of the sun” and the only colour in Lis Evans’s perfectly drab 1950s set, a young woman bursting with an energy that cannot be contained.
Making a debut as assured as it is bolshie, Rossi has the measure of this ever-restless teenager, bored by her faithful fiance (Elliot Goodhill), enticed by the illicit thrill of her married boss (Perry Moore), entertained by the showbiz ambitions of her stage partner (Andrew Pollard), and worth more than all of them put together. In Abbey Wright’s well acted production, she rides above the perfunctory plot and heavily signalled denouement and makes it her own.
At New Vic, Newcastle-under-Lyme, until 21 June
