Review: Black Tie Ball at the New Vic Theatre in Newcastle-under-Lyme
John Godber’s new play Black Tie Ball, touring at the New Vic, sported plenty of black bow ties but turned out to be not much of a ball.
The setup was promising. Four much-put-upon waiting staff attempt to hold the fort on a big night at a sprawling Yorkshire hotel.
There’s a literary society meeting in one suite, a wedding party in another, and a school prom somewhere else, while wealthy owner Sir Graham is hosting the annual businessmen’s ball in the Venn Room.
The chef has quit, the front-of-house manager has locked himself away, and the band Sir Graham has booked turns up late and promptly gets drunk.
The four introduce themselves in dry but worthy terms as local Godber working-class characters. They seem to spend much of the first half with lugubrious expressions, moaning about how nobody knows what’s going on and they haven’t had anything to eat for hours.
The laughter is wafer-thin. When Duncan says “I’m a student. I’m thirty-two” he gets one. When the one called Joy is told to put on a smiley face she says “This IS my smiley face” and gets another.
Each time the cast don posh jackets to play guests at the ball they launch into a hearty round of fake guffaws. Back as the put-upons, they fret about what to do with the stranded Dutch tourists after their bus knocked into the front door the tractor which brought someone to the prom. Oh, and there was a murder somewhere.
“For one night, all the chaos of the world can be held in one hand,” Duncan says. But it comes across as all talk. The hard-pressed foursome spend un-chaotic lengths of time leaning on brooms or mops, talking about things like how 7 per cent of the people own 84 per cent of the wealth.
Godber succeeds in entertaining many in his audience with a sort of earnest nostalgia for time and place. He references ‘the Selby coal seam – the biggest in Europe’ and the Orgreave miners’ strike. He tells us that the inventor of the Venn diagram was born in Hull. His long-serving staffer Ronnie quotes Romeo and Juliet at length thanks to his past with the WEA.
To their credit, the cast gradually win the audience’s sympathy. There are more laughs in the second half and the chaos coalesces briefly around a cheering musical conclusion.
Black Tie Ball is on at the New Vic Theatre until Saturday, October 11.
