Big Ange Review – Divided Britain Faces the Dinner Lady | stage

WWhy has society become so polarized? Angela (Joan Condon) thinks it was 2005 with Jamie Oliver. As the Dinner Lady, she was forced to dispose of the Turkish Twizzlers when the TV chef turned his guns on fast food. It’s a wonky analysis but you can see where she’s coming from.

Her confusion is partly the point. Playwright and director Jamie Eastlake wants to understand a country drawn to Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’s far-right protests and to the civil disobedience organized by Just Stop Oil. In a complex world, simple answers reassure us, but what is the real cause of our discontent?

Angela is the good fairy in the piece. She has spent twenty years in the North East, speaks with a Tottenham accent, and has a heart-driven sense of right and wrong. It’s the whole spirit of the community. After seeing football manager Angie Postecoglou, she reinvents herself to become Big Ang and help turn the school team into a winning team.

Meanwhile, the forces of good and evil line up to fight for the soul of 18-year-old Stephen Mooney (Curtis Appleby), a boy from Blyth who is distressed by the economic decline of his home town of Northumberland and longs to find someone to blame. Will he go with his older sister Caroline (Irene Mullen), who has taken her socialist values ​​south for a comfortable life of middle-class protests? Or will he join the evil fascist and nameless witch (Lucy Eve Mann) who encourages anti-Islamic videos online?

We’re close enough to Christmas to guess how this morality tale will end, but that’s not to downplay the importance of the playwright’s questions. Eastlake, who continues to enjoy success with his adaptation of Jonathan Tulloch’s Jerry and Sewell, has some uneven writing, underdeveloped themes and the odd off-kilter joke as he weaves between his parallel stories, but he also has a strong sense that all of these issues — disenfranchisement, justice, extremism — need to be openly discussed with empathy and humor.

As a director, sending an eight-person chorus all dancing and scoring, in defiance of the small stage, is a smart move. Their simultaneous enthusiasm gives theatrical life to questions that affect us all.