You can see why Jack McNamara was drawn to this all-girl story of a teenage punk band for his debut manufacturing as creative director of Newcastle’s Stay theatre. Right here was an opportunity to place younger north-eastern actors on the stage, champion native playwright Rebecca Glendenning and enchantment to a crowd who just like the style of scuzzy rock’n’roll with their theatre.
In not less than a few of these facets, We Are the Greatest! succeeds. On Lily Arnold’s wood skate-park of a set, calling out to be clambered over and slid down, the central trio performed by Bridget Marumo, Bethany Morris and Elena Porter deliver an amiable vitality to a jokey script that retains the temper gentle and punkishly throwaway.
There are full of life performances too from Beruce Khan, as a down-with-the-kids youth membership chief, Stacey Ghent, as a humourless trainer compering the varsity expertise present, and Anna Bolton, as a midlife-crisis mum.
On paper, it may have had the tearaway subversiveness of Our Girls of Perpetual Succour, the Lee Corridor adaptation of Alan Warner’s The Sopranos, co-produced by Stay theatre in 2015. Or it may have had the girl-power swagger of the Channel 4 drama We Are Woman Elements.
What it shouldn’t have been is inconsequential. But scene after scene of We Are the Greatest! skips by with nothing at stake and nothing to be resolved. I’m not saying it's gradual, but it surely takes the entire first half for the band to get a guitar. All that raises the temperature after the interval is a squabble over a boy.
The supply materials is Lukas Moodysson’s 2013 film of the identical identify, tailored from the graphic novel By no means Goodnight by Coco Moodysson. Set within the Sweden of 1982, when even followers of Patti Smith should admit a sneaking respect for Abba’s Voulez-Vous, it's a couple of band of 13-year-olds who've mastered their devices sufficient to provide one tune, a petulant thrash referred to as Sports activities Are Shit.
However no matter perception the unique had into adolescent resourcefulness, coming-of-age angst and fraught parental relationships drifts on stage into scenes of moping and obscure introspection. It finally ends up because the story of three ladies who overcome nearly no obstacles to play a gig – and it takes greater than that to make a play.
We Are the Greatest! is at Stay theatre, Newcastle, till 18 June.
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