Smiths "If You Have Five Seconds to Spare" Theatre Review

THEATRE/A Mancunian legend at The Contact

Mope tops

If You Have Five Seconds To Spare 

Guy Nelson

IN the last couple of years since the demise of The Smiths, Manchester has played annual host to a convention of their most fervent fans. Morrissey’s children are offered the chance to visit his old school, the house where he grew up and the various landmarks documented in his songs. The coachloads of bequiffed youngsters inevitably end up in the Hacienda where they grow unruly and scream at the DJ when he plays anything but their hero.

Robert Graham has taken this curious event for the climax of his play, performed by the Contact Youth Theatre, which focuses, not on Morrisey’s life story, but rather on the effect The Smiths have on Mancunian youth. He appears to have chosen the wiser course as it is difficult to imagine a biographical piece on Manchester’s main mitherer as anything but a bedroom recluse farce.

Amid various episodic scenes Graham concentrates on the lives of Jimmy and Lisa, the former a Morrissey sound-alike whose ultimate aim is to go to Paris and become Samuel Beckett’s secretary. The inevitable teenage pregnancy (“William, It Was Really Nothing”) means he will not be exchanging Whalley Range for the Left Bank just yet.

Graham’s (and Morrissey’s) influences are shouted loud rather than hidden. Lines from Kitchen Sink films of the Sixties such as Billy Liar (“You and your bloody oranges”) are lifted wholesale. It would be interesting to find out what Morrissey thinks of such a cheeky sort of plagiarism. As he says in “Cemetery Gates”: “If you must write prose and poems, the words you use should be your own.” But then again he carved out the early part of his career rewriting Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey in various songs.

Craig Hewitt’s imaginative design has televisions littering the stage with scenes from the likes of A Kind Of Loving and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, mirroring the play’s action. Such blatant parallels indicate that Graham has little new to say about love, relationships or humdrum lives. But he does manage to convey with humour the value of icons and the paradoxical business of accepting yourself. Among the talented ensemble playing by the huge cast of 60, carefully marshalled by director Lawrence Till, Tony Lewis is outstanding as Jimmy, who refuses to let his life follow the dreariness of Co-Op clothes and The Sun. But it is Gloria Benjamin as Rio who best displays the intense parochial demand that The Smiths belong to Manchester and to no-one else.

The most telling indication Graham gives of The Smiths’ influence on their home town is right at the start when the cast chants a description of the city pre-Smiths. Joy Division and The Fall are (wrongly) blamed for an atmosphere of musical depression which permeated the whole city. “This Charming Man” is pinpointed as the crucial moment when the city’s youth cast off their raincoats and embraced daffodils instead. From that point on, The Smiths were a world in which to immerse yourself and a confirmation that it is acceptable to be complicated.