If
you remember boys in Eyeliner and Girls on Film…
If
you remember the importance of cheekbones and being
the best at Pacman…
If
every now and then , you want to dance on cars shouting
"Fame!"…
If
you still catch yourself trying to turn up the collar
of your shirt, and push up the sleeves of your jacket…
…then
GOLD! is especially for you!
GOLD! was Hull Truck's
Christmas production 1998, which I wrote and directed.
It then went out on a national tour in a re-written
version which John Godber directed.
In both versions the central
premise is the same - a group of five people who were
at university together in the early 1980's, and were
all in a student band, get back together in the present
day to form an eighties tribute band. The play starts
with them meeting up again after two decades, and having
a tentative stab at few glam rock classics, and ends
with a full concert in appropriate eighties costumes.
It was a pretty shameless
attempt to write something that heavily featured some
of the great Eighties classics and it was interesting
in rehearsal to note which took weeks to put together
and which sounded pretty close to the original in the
time it takes to boil a kettle. On a good night with
a full auditorium it was fabulous, with entire audiences
dancing and singing along, and not letting the actors
leave the stage. With smaller audiences in bigger venues
it was less effective, but always got a good response.
