Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Cast: David Judge.

What does family mean in a world where the idea of relationships have become almost throwaway, consumable, there only in some eyes to fill a statistic and perhaps to belong to something rather than be on their own; the idea of family has become in some ways a short hand for strangers treating you as their own, perhaps even with the notion of reckless, limited loyalty when it all gets too much to cope with.

Loyalty, the belief that someone has come into your life to be cared for, not mattering one jot of their creed, colour, background of ethnicity, all they need is to be cared for and in return, arguably, to make you understand that you are needed in this world. Family is where you can be treated like a human being, that your opinion matters, where you are safe from the world but also where the lessons learned may be hard, where the arguments might occasionally get out of hand, but where ultimately you are loved beyond all else.

For David Judge, relieving the pain and extent of his life as a man of mixed heritage but through the eyes and emotions of the man he called his Dad, family must be one in which is satisfying, if not a little cathartic, to display as he offers a tour de force of the dramatic single hander, Sparkplug.

Leaving your teens behind in the 1980s, taking on a young girl’s as yet unborn baby, knowing that the colour of the child will possibly cause an incendiary situation from your immediate family, and then dealing with the issues that crop up from the mother of the one you have come to care for as your own as she leaves her life behind her. It is not an ideal life to perhaps think of having, one that would cause flashpoints in that era which was still suffering from the hangover of the race relation’s that had blighted the previous decades. And yet for David it almost feels selfless, he not only took his namesake under his wing, treated him care and spirit, he become a hero.

Told through the instrument of the one-man performance and with the actor’s father’s obsession of cars highlighting the passion of building, and restoring something to its ultimate beauty, David Judge brings home the message learned with absolute panache, a stirring, positive creation which is bold, brash and brilliant.

Sparkplug is a genuine look and appreciation of race through the eyes of one who took on prejudice and saw the beauty of what could be; proving that family is in the end about those who take you in and love you.

Ian D. Hall