Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *

Cast: Roy Brandon, Eithne Browne, Carl Chase, Suzanne Collins, Paul Duckworth, Adam Keast, Andrew Schofield, Francis Tucker.

It is undoubtedly one of the finest productions to come out of Merseyside in the last ten years, a difficult birth it may have been, a show that found itself with an audience but being put on due to commitments and other factors somehow making the play seem an impossibility and yet a decade on, over 200,000 members of the public later, Brick Up The Mersey Tunnels is a show of insurmountable honest and terrifically funny appeal; so much so that it is only right and proper for it to come back to the Royal Court Theatre and give the jolt of marvellous humour needed after a January of gloom and false starts.

Brick Up The Mersey Tunnels has everything that can be desired from a locally produced show, expert writers in Nicky Allt and Dave Kirby, a sensational cast, the right setting and music that just grabs the audience by the lapels and asks them to not just hum the tunes but to fall in love with the re-workings of popular and remarkable songs. It also has one other thing that many productions that have been and gone over the years, the huge sense of loyalty to the people that come along, that fill the Royal Court to the rafters, and to the creative geniuses that make the experience such a delight to witness take shape and become as colourful as a sky full of rainbows melting and dripping down onto the Mersey.

It is that loyalty, expressive, conductive and fulfilling that makes the play the hit in the city that it is and whilst there were very big shoes to fill on the night with the retirement of one of the original cast, Mr. Davy Edge, the show continued in its absolute search for the beauty that resides in the differences between the Wirral and Liverpool, the river that connects both entities of the same foundation. It is the people that make Merseyside and this play is a celebration of those people, in all their different guises and attitudes.

A night of brilliant humour, of top performances by all and one that has not lost a drop of sparkle of wit in the years since it first catapulted itself into the hearts of the Merseyside public, Brick Up The Mersey Tunnels is home once more and it remains the production to see.

Ian D. Hall