Picture from Liverpool Daily Post

Originally published by L.S. Media. September 2nd 2011.

Cast: Micky Finn, Terry O’Shea, Mark Allen, Ruth Laird, Louise Thomas, Laura McEwan, Clair Griffiths, Dave Crosby, Ami-Lee Price, Charlie Griffiths.

For tears, laughter, a genuine dollop of nostalgia and long buried memories, audiences could not go far wrong to catch Brian McCann’s musical play Down Our Street.

Although only running for three days at the Unity Theatre, the play is sold out with no room to spare as audiences were treated to the birth of a town and an industry that supported the growth and presided over some of the bad times that sometimes inevitably follows it.

Brian McCann’s script can be seen as the antidote to the perpetual question of the Liverpool and The Wirral divide that sometimes stretches the relatively short distance across the Mersey into a chasm, there is so much in common between the two sides of water that sometimes we don’t see it till someone comes along and points it out. In Birkenhead’s case the fortunes and failings of the town have ebbed and flowed over time like the body of water between them and the Liver Building.

Down Our Street isn’t just about the script though, no matter how good the stories or real the events that shadow everybody’s lives, it requires great strength from the actors on stage to put a production like this into the minds and hearts of their audiences. In Down Our Street, it had that in abundance with the Liverpool legend Micky Finn, the wonderful Charlie Griffiths and the talented Ami-Lee Price amongst a great and popular cast. There was also the poignant inclusion of Ruth Liard, great, great, great granddaughter of William Laird, in that it added an extra personal dimension to the historical structure of the play.

Down Our Street screams out greatness and is one of those plays that surely should be seen by a wider audience that will get much out of the narrative, the despair that is seen when Cammell Laird’s suffers misfortune, sometimes of its own making, the history and scandal that dogged the ship yard and the destruction of Birkenhead at the hands of the Nazi war machine. Nowhere is this shocking that when you see the excellent Mark Allen’s portrayal of a small child looking for his friend whose house has been bombed. It takes strength to hold back the tears as you witness the horror on his face.

An excellent start to the Unity Theatres new season and the cast should be proud of their performances.

4 stars

Ian D. Hall