How they’re putting Steptoe on the stage

TAKE one of the greatest comedy situations ever imagined, one of the best comedy writing duos Britain has ever produced and a theatre company that has been on fire for the past decade and, while there is no such thing as a guaranteed hit, you surely can’t go too far wrong.

Not that Emma Rice is banking on success.

“I am cursed and blessed by an inability to think about the fact that a show has been successful,” says Rice.

“Watching the Olympics has been interesting because it is so definite. If you run the fastest, or jump the highest, you win. It’s so definite. The way art is judged just isn’t like that. For me, it never feels like I have had a hit show, because I always feel I could do better.”

Rice is artistic director of Kneehigh Theatre Company, an organisation that has enjoyed a staggering run of success over the past 10 years. Although based in Cornwall, Kneehigh has found a second home at West Yorkshire Playhouse for the past decade, where Leeds audiences have been incredibly loyal to the theatre makers and their work.

Now the two organisations, Kneehigh and the Playhouse, have teamed up to create a new production of Steptoe and Son which receives its world premiere next week.

Ray Galton and Alan Simpson’s existential comedy was one of the most important situation comedies in the history of British television. The story of Albert Steptoe and his son Harold, desperate to escape their lives as scrap metal merchants, has regularly been cited as one of the greatest pieces of writing in British television comedy.

“I’m interested in popular culture and obviously knew of Steptoe,” says Rice.

“But when I actually started reading the scripts, I was stunned. Some of those early episodes are jaw-droppingly good. The writing is genuinely phenomenal.

“I would put money on the fact that Pinter watched those early episodes before he wrote The Caretaker.”

It’s often said that one of the rules of situation-comedy is to have a hero trapped in their circumstance. Steptoe and Son couldn’t be a more clear example of that. Harold, the son of the title, is desperate to escape his life, but is constantly held back by his cantankerous, hobo father Albert.

The bleakness of the situation could make for a seriously downbeat piece of work, but Galton and Simpson, the pair who also created Hancock’s Half Hour, inject the piece with humour as well as pathos.

Both appealed to Rice who, as well as directing the piece has adapted it for the stage from the original scripts.

“I think we make a collective decision about whether something is dramatic, or funny, or poetic, and it just so happens that Steptoe and Son has been put in a box labelled ‘funny’,” she says.

“Going back to the scripts has been really interesting because it’s revealed to me that more than anything else, the best word for the story is simply ‘truthful’. It’s truly an incredible piece of writing.”

It is an interesting combination – the anarchic fun Rice’s Kneehigh Theatre inevitably bring to a piece of work and the bleakly brilliant writing of Galton and Simpson. But is there not a risk of alienating or even angering fans of the original?

Despite the fact that the TV show appeared in the early 1960s, with a second run in the early 1970s, there are plenty around who still remember Steptoe and Son – even if they were too young to have actually seen it first time around. By putting the particular Kneehigh stamp on the piece, does Rice run the risk of upsetting fans of the original?

One of the big decisions that people have already been chattering about is in the casting. The TV show was one of the first to cast “proper” actors, as opposed to comedians, in comedy roles.

Both Wilfrid Brambell (Albert) and Harry H Corbett (Harold) learned their trade working in rep. The character of Harold is being taken by Dean Nolan, who will be familiar to Yorkshire audiences from his performance alongside Phill Jupitus in Red Ladder’s Big Society. A popular actor with audiences and fellow performers, he is also, it’s fair to say, a big bloke. He doesn’t really have the look of a starving rag and bone man.

“He absolutely nails the character and has this look of a man trapped,” says Rice.

“He plays the character beautifully. We’re absolutely not setting out to do impressions of the actors 
from the TV programme. 
For a start, that would be a disaster. This is a version of the story of two men, trapped by poverty, trapped by their situation and each other. It’s brilliant.”