Rhodri Mellir as Spike in Bright Phoenix. Photograph by Jonathan Keenan.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Carl Au, Paul Duckworth, Rhian Green, Penny Layden, Rhodri Mellir, Mark Rice-Oxley, Cathy Tyson, Keiran Urquhart, Laura J. Martin, Vidar Norheim.
Somewhere over the rooftops of Liverpool, a haunting soliloquy is sang softly by one of the people the new renaissance taking place in the city couldn’t touch. In Lime Street an old ghost comes home to face the past and a group of children’s memories are re-awoken. The Futurist Cinema may be gone but its soul still resonates in those that made it their home and for the future, a Bright Phoenix stirs from the ashes of a crumbling society.
Jeff Young’s latest play to make its way into the hearts and minds of the Liverpool public, Bright Phoenix, is a timely reminder that whilst Liverpool has in the last ten years has become a place in which business, life and culture has been elevated to a point where visitors come in their millions every year, in which the decline that blighted the city has been reversed and in which Liverpool has become the place in which culture is more widely appreciated than any other part of the U.K.. There are still some and some old venues that have been unforgivingly left behind, forgotten to the point where something starts to kick back.
If the past is another country because they do things differently there, then when countries and times collide does it suggest a war between ideologies? For a city that was cast aside by the rest of the country in the 70s and 80s, its population at times ridiculed and sneered at by those who consider themselves humorous or worse with a political agenda in which “Me first” was a growing mantra, anything that happened would still resonate between the tick and the tock of the ages. Writer Jeff Young captures this perfectly and the way he frames Liverpool and the goings on in Lime Street, (The New York equivalent of the area between 28th and 50th street before New York took action) is one to take heart in that affection of a certain street or building will always grab somebody’s love. For the shamefully run down edifice of The Futurist cinema, love is exactly what it needs. For those that remember it in its heyday, love is also needed before they also get left behind in the cultural Liverpool revolution.
The cast were on absolute top form, a 21st Century’s Beggar’s Opera like appeal to the whole play wowed the audience inside and the feeling of regret to elements of the past, punctuated with excellent humour, hung in the air like fine mist slowly descending and smothering in a tight threadbare blanket.
For Carl Au as Alan ‘Icarus’ Flynn, Rhodri Meilir, in his debut performance in the Everyman, as the one-eyed Spike Smith and Mark Rice-Oxley as the boy ‘going through a phase’ Stephen Shakey, this was a play in which their talents were fully appreciated, especially for Mr. Rice-Oxley who was utterly captivating all evening.
The city belongs to everyone, its movement, its heart is strong and beats to a strange heady cocktail that makes dreams possible like no other place, yet some get left behind, some get forgotten and Jeff Young highlights this wonderfully in Bright Phoenix. A class act!
Ian D. Hall