Absolute Beginners

Synopsis

Roy Williams, Soweto Kinch and dance theatre director Liam Steel join forces to create an explosively physical evocation of sexual liberalism, gang culture and racial tension, based on Colin MacInnes' bestseller Absolute Beginners. Set in the summer of 1958 that ends with the Notting Hill race riots, Absolute Beginners paints a vivid picture of London's changing society and the emergence of a style-conscious youth culture, as teenagers blow away the cobwebs of post-war life and create the world anew. Not recommended for under 14s

Our Review:

4 May 2007

Here is a fascinating project that doesn’t catch fire. Colin MacInnes’ brilliant 1959 novel about the first teenagers, the new television age of instant celebrity, pop and jazz, and the Notting Hill race riots of 1958, is a cool classic of swaggering style and front-line reportage.

The unnamed narrator in Absolute Beginners is a true participant in the scene he observes – “they’ll make musicals one day about the glamour-studded 1950s,” he remarks acidly, and prophetically – swinging through London (before it was “swinging”), from photoshoots to coffee bars and jazz clubs in Soho to low dives and parties on his own West London patch of “Napoli”.

The Lyric has taken the “art house” route with all this, when what was probably needed was a touch of the old Joan Littlewoods, a bit of up-and-at-it rough and tumble. Playwright Roy Williams has done some deft filleting, using much of the original dialogue, structuring the rising racist temperature through Ph...

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Latest User Review

rds - 18 May 2007:

I had trouble posting my comment - below - and when it did log the bloody thing reduced my 5* rating to a 3* which is wrong. So I have returned to add the proper 5*s to this extraordinary piece of theatre....

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