THE LAST SHIP ★★★½
Glasshouse Theatre, QPAC, April 11
Until May 3
Sting walks onto a floating stage surrounded by welders and stirrups, but this isn’t an early MTV music video. He plays a ship’s foreman in the north of England, in a self-penned musical, and his live presence on stage in Brisbane gives the shiny new Glasshouse Theater a huge bottle of champagne to hit its bow.
The Last Ship, which first opened in Chicago in 2014, is the pop artist’s homage to Wallsend-on-Tyne, the shipyard town where he grew up in the 1950s and ’60s and which was shut down in the 80s.
Margaret Thatcher’s war on trade unions, and her privatization of national industries, has become drama, from the TV score. The boys from Blackstuff for Full Moon and Billy Elliot. But when the shuttering of the dockyard is the environment The Last Shipit doesn’t go too far into the impact on working people, or how Thatcher’s politics destroyed society, or indeed (as Sting suggested in an interview), how massive digital computing is coming to all our jobs, too.
It’s more of a story about making peace with your past. Which makes sense, as Sting left Wallsend behind after a troubled upbringing to become one of the biggest rock artists in the world, and he feels he’s owed a place there. But it is also about death because, he is now 74 years old.
Sting’s character, Jackie White, receives bad health news at the same time that he discovers that the government has sold off the town’s main source of employment. Meanwhile, 30-something sailor Gideon Fletcher (Declan Bennett) returns to his hometown after 17 years to settle his late father’s affairs and catch up on unfinished business with his hot girlfriend, bar owner Meg Dawson (Lauren Samuels).
The musical has been rewritten twice by different writers since its Tony-nominated, but financially unsuccessful, Broadway run. The latest script is by English playwright and author Barney Norris, but Norris and director Leo Warner (of London’s 59 Studio) haven’t quite solved the show’s major problems.
Those problems include a long second act that has about three more songs than it needs, and a climactic ending that takes too long to get off the docket.
Fans of Sting and The Police should be more than happy though. He’s on stage for a good chunk of the action, gets to sing some great material (including the rousing title track), but still pulls off the magic trick of disappearing into character. And after all, it’s not as if he doesn’t have decades of acting experience under his belt.
The songs are soulful and frankly – some folk-based; others showing the composer’s DNA Moon over Bourbon Street and Every Breath You Take.
There are big roles for women here: among them Annette McLaughlin as the mammoth Peggy White, and Samuels, the old Elphaba in Wicked – and he sounds like it.
One who might feel a little underserved is Shaggy. The character of the Wallsend Ferryman is a little arrogant – a lovable angel of death – but he could still have more to do with the story with half a song and an odd throwaway line.
The music manifests itself more clearly in the scene where Gideon visits his late father’s house and sings lewd songs. Dead Man’s Shoesa song that skillfully fills in the blanks about his past. It is followed by Night Pugilist Learned How to Playa lovely how-did-I-meet-your-mother song for the benefit of Meg’s teenage daughter, Ellen (in a Hannah Richardson turn).
Against her mother’s wishes, Ellen wants to leave Wallsend and move to London to sing in a band: she is another Sting agent. Gideon’s warning to Ellen – “If you go the wrong way, you’ll never go” – is The Last Shipof aha minutes.
There are scandalous lines, death scenes, bombastic (and boombastic) pieces – this is what cuts the most depth.
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Nick Dent is the Culture Reporter at the Brisbane Times, covering arts and things to do in the city.Connect through email address.
