Please Please Me at the Kiln Theatre – review

Tom Wright’s first play is a heartfelt attempt to put a forgotten figure back at the centre of the story of the most famous pop group in the world. Brian Epstein, also known as the “Fifth Beatle”, was the Liverpool record shop manager who recognised the talent of the Fab Four and set them on the road to fame and fortune.

He was also Jewish, homosexual and, at least in this telling, half in love with the rebellious and equally conflicted John Lennon.

Lennon is in fact the only Beatle who makes an appearance in this biography, along with Cilla Black, whom Epstein also managed, and who in Eleanor Worthington-Cox’s affectionate portrayal emerges as one of the few characters who both understands and cares for him.

Epstein’s story is a fascinating piece of cultural history, not least as a reminder of the great distance between 1963 and today, with that strange realisation that the heyday of the Beatles came in a period much closer to the Second World War than to the iPhone and Elon Musk.

Wright’s telling plunges us straight into the heart of things in an opening scene in which Epstein (Calam Lynch) – and his upright father – are blackmailed by one of the men he has picked up in search of rough sex, at a time when consensual sex between men was still punishable by imprisonment.

Like a lot of the play, it is admirable in its directness and honesty, but clumsy in its execution. This is a work that has to cover so much ground, taking Epstein and his charges from early obscurity to world beating superstardom on their part and a mysterious, lonely death on his, that it is reduced to offering great gobbets of exposition as the scene swiftly changes from place to place.

Amit Sharma’s direction handles this fluidly, and Tom Piper’s clever set effortlessly moves from a furniture shop in 1961 Liverpool to a holiday in Torremolinos where Epstein and Lennon are shown having a sexual encounter (based on Yoko Ono’s assertion that John said they had sex twice – “the first time to see what it was like, the second to make sure I didn’t like it.”). The design for the Cavern is particularly evocative, where John emerges from an archway as a silhouetted figure framed by Rory Beaton’s warm spotlights.

But rights issues mean there is no music, and the structure reduces every scene to an incident rather than a drama. There’s no real exploration of Epstein’s increasingly fractured state, and characters are left spouting platitudes to explain what is going on. Noah Ritter, making his stage debut, doesn’t look or sound much like Lennon and it is hard for him to build any sense of the man’s danger or appeal when he has to stand there and explain to Epstein that he was a happily wild, feral genius, until Epstein put him in a cage.

Worthington-Cox, hampered by some unhappy costumes, makes what she can of all the female characters, including Lennon’s fearsome Aunt Mimi and put-upon wife Cynthia, and William Robinson and Arthur Wilson offer excellent support in a variety of roles.

But the best reason to see Please Please Me is Lynch’s performance as Epstein, full of charm and agony, gradually disintegrating as the shame and stress of his life destroys him, but always capable of prompting affection in those around him. It’s a performance that suggests more than the script gives him to say – and honours a visionary and unhappy man.