Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Cast: Richard Fleeshman, Charlie Hardwick, Joe McGann, Frances McNamee, Joe Caffrey, Matt Corner, Anne Grace, Sean Kearns, Katie Moore, Charlie Richmond, Parisa Shahmir, Kevin Wathen, Marvin Ford, Penelope Woodman, James William-Pattison, Michael Blair, Susan Fay, Orla Gormley.
There have been many shameful periods in the history of the country, especially since World War Two ended and the thought of big Government in all its forms has risen its various ugly and uncaring heads to take on big organisations and labour.
The mineworkers, the farmers, the teachers, the nurses, they have been dealt hands that were crooked, bent, and all done in the name of the free market, the sloth like, overfed, dependent on the slip of the coin creature that forces public services to close and set great swathes of working men and women on the road to hardship. When a politician can say without fear of ridicule that we have to tighten our belts for the good of the country and in the same breath suggest that M.P.s cannot live on their salary and demand more, then you know the country has reached the final tipping point before people start demanding a system of rebellion.
It is to the dockworkers, the men and women who build our ships, the services they employ, that seems to have been kicked again and again, from the Clyde, to the Mersey and the ship building yards of Newcastle and Sunderland to whom the political football has become as arguably bent and corrupt as a hypothetical former chief of football’s biggest organisation. Expendable, that is always the though, not cheap enough is another, however these are skilled people, dedicated and deserving of more and in The Last Ship, the warning that our last great bastion of pride, the N.H.S. is next for the chop cannot be heard loud enough.
The Last Ship though is more than just a vision of a kind of Hell to come for all, the loss of honest toil in which community is more important than any hot air and the noise of the wringing of hands coming from the circus at Westminster. It is also a love story, one played out two levels, the lost love of a boy that ran away to sea so he could avoid just being another name on the slipway, and the girl he left behind, and that communities love for what their town was famous for, the absolute pride in creating something behemoth, a ship that would sail the seas and oceans and carry goods and lives across thousands of miles of water safely.
In this intertwining of lives, where one always has an eye open for their neighbour, the music and lyrics created by Sting and the book and words by Director Lorne Campbell, magic, open ended honesty and hard graft is always going to come shining through. With exceptional performances by the four main leads of Richard Fleeshman, Charlie Hardwick, Joe McGann and Francis McNamee, and stand-out performances by Katie Moore and Kevin Wathen, The Last Ship is a testament to the human spirit, of never allowing your voice to be stifled by the wheels of commerce and the slug-like figure called the economy peddled by people who have no idea what lays beyond their ivory towers.
A stunning piece of theatre, a story of truth that we are fighting every day; The Last Ship should forever sail!
Ian D. Hall