West End Drum Roll for Beatles’ Backbeat???

Beatlemania is back – or could be soon. Backbeat, the screen-to-stage adaptation of the 1994 Brit flick about the early years of the Beatles, is aiming for a West End premiere this autumn. The play, written and co-directed by the film’s creator Iain Softley, had its world premiere in February 2010 at Glasgow Citizens Theatre.

Set during ‘the Hamburg Years’ in the early 1960s before the band became successful and world famous, Backbeat centres on the triangular relationship between Stuart Sutcliffe, the band’s original bassist and an accomplished painter, his best friend John Lennon, and Astrid Kirchherr, the beatnik German photographer who Sutcliffe fell in love with. Struggling with his various loyalties, Sutcliffe eventually chose Astrid and art over the Beatles and music.

Sutcliffe handed over his guitar to Paul McCartney just before Beatlemania took off. Shortly after leaving the band, he died in Hamburg, at the age of just 22, of a brain haemorrhage. His portrait featured on the Beatles’ album cover for Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.