Theatre reviews: The Last Train to Scarborough, Avenue Q, Nine Lives

There is something special about bringing together several of Yorkshire’s most consistently good actors and putting them in a cast for a single play. Matthew Booth, Andy Cryer, Liam Evans-Ford and Steve Huison are all actors who have been plying their trade in Yorkshire theatre for a number of years. 
 True fans will have seen them in several plays over the years and their combination in this play is greater than the sum of its parts. They are joined on stage by an equally good Jennifer Bryden, for this adaptation of Andrew Martin’s novel.

A murder mystery, it is part of a series of novels by Martin about Detective Sergeant Jim Stringer, a railway detective operating along the Northern railways in Edwardian England. Blackly comic, there is enormous fun to be had 
rom the performances of 
the cast. Matt Booth as Stringer, has a real everyman quality that is attractive to watch and Evans-Ford is particularly funny as Adam, the damaged young man who works in the Scarborough B &B around which Stringer’s investigation hinges.

The transitions into the dream sequences are distracting and interrupt the flow of the story, but when it is rocketing along, in the hands of this cast, this is great fun.

• To June 14.

Avenue Q, Leeds Grand Theatre ****

The very best ideas have a neat simplicity to them. The mark of a brilliant idea is that when you come across you think “why did no-one think to do this before?”.

Avenue Q falls firmly in the camp of brilliant ideas that are so brilliant in their simplicity you wonder what took everyone so long to catch on to the fact that it would be great fun to see what happens to those puppets who aren’t quite good enough, or wholesome enough, to end up on Sesame Street. The answer is they end up on Avenue Q. Not quite Skid Row, it’s probably only a rung or two above that address.

To understand why Avenue Q has been such a phenomenon, you have to only look at two of the lesser, although pivotal, characters of the show. The Bad Idea Bears are one of those three-in-the-morning creations that might have looked a little odd in the cold light of day. Like Care Bears gone bad, they are an irreverent, strange creation who encourage the hero, Princeton, to do things from buying a case of beer when he finally has some money to contemplating suicide.

It sounds sick, infantile and it is hilarious. Not only because the notion of Bad Idea Bears is funny, but because it inverts what you expect from these cute, fluffy characters.

Played with the over-the-top enthusiasm of a children’s TV presenter, they are not extolling the virtues of learning how to spell, or eating your vegetables, but of staying up drinking all night the day before an important meeting.

The show is not just a one-joke pony. It also has heart, great songs and brilliant performances.

Nine Lives, West Yorkshire Playhouse ****

Presented as part of the West Yorkshire Playhouse’s A Play, A Pie and A Pint event series, this is one of the most alarmingly relevant plays you’ll have seen in this building for a while.

The nature of A Play, a Pie and a A Pint means it is able to be fleet-footed and adaptable. While I’m sure writer Zodwa Nyoni wasn’t redrafting this with less than a week to go before curtain up, the fact that the time lag from writing the play to seeing it on stage can be very short is surely an enormous help in giving it the sense of urgency shot through Nyoni’s piece.

Less than a fortnight since the alarming victory of far right parties across Europe in the elections, Nine Lives sheds some light on the reality of being an asylum seeker in modern Britain. Turns out it isn’t huge flatscreen TVs and cooking the Queen’s swans. Who knew?

Ishmael, a gay man, flees his home country for the safety of Britain. Only here he has to tackle depression, bullying teenagers in his block of flats and the prospect of no human contact for weeks.

A monologue in which Lladel Bryant plays Ishmael and several other characters, it is when he is bringing us the heart of Ishmael that he is at his best. The caricatures around his character are a distraction but as Ishmael he brings to heartbreaking life the poetry of Nyoni’s script. A young writer, her style belies her years in the telling of a story that feels more important than ever.