Godber’s one-hander, Beef, has grown up and branched out over the years from its humble origins as The Weed, a single-act play providing gender-balancing support for a one-woman show at Hull Truck in 1998. With the addition of a second act The Weed became Beef & Yorkshire Pudding, served up as a fundraiser for Wakefield Theatre Royal and again at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2004. Now, Beef has changed again, arriving at the North Wall for a single performance with a brand new second act and a dark, disturbing tone absent from its previous incarnations.
The earlier stages in the play’s development can be traced in the current production, directed by Nick Lane, who played the role of Dave (played here by Matthew Booth) in all previous productions. The first act remains a broad if poignant comedy of procrastination: Dave, a Yorkshire teenager, signally fails to achieve anything (other than a slipped disc) in his quest to obtain the physical bulk that he is sure will free him from his fear of the schoolyard bullies, and help him win back his lost girlfriend. His imagination is filled with fantasies of the crude cartoon violence and sexual conquests of his bodybuilding heroes, but he rarely situates his own hoped-for competition victories further afield than the nearest miners’ welfare club. Aspirational fantasies mix with bathetic slapstick as Dave struggles to bend his weightlifting belt, and mixes up the milk bottles containing his drinking water with one he has refilled with urine.
2004’s Beef & Yorkshire Pudding saw Dave not getting big (hardly a surprise to the audience, who witness his routine), but instead getting clever and funny. Years on, he is as a stand-up comedian turning his adolescent experiences into material - the character having much in common with Godber himself. Beef 2009, however, offers the audience much gamier meat. Dave, six years older and weighing in at seventeen stone, roars his way through a workout back in his parents’ smelly garage after three ‘wasted’ years spent at a university at which he didn’t fit in. At the same time he slowly reveals to an increasingly uncomfortable audience just who and what needs to be ‘sorted’ at the Pretoria club that evening. Dave has learned that the alternative to being afraid is to be feared: the bullies who once tormented him now court him, worshipping and ‘touching’ (the word is spat out again and again) his bulging biceps. At once enjoying and loathing the attention, he is forced to prove himself in the changing room and on the football pitch, and finally - at a sordid suburban sex party described in unsettling detail - in the bedroom.
While Dave fails magnificently in his desire to be 'big' and clever, John Godber manages to be both. What is surprising is that he is quite so funny along the path towards the play's devastating conclusion.
The earlier stages in the play’s development can be traced in the current production, directed by Nick Lane, who played the role of Dave (played here by Matthew Booth) in all previous productions. The first act remains a broad if poignant comedy of procrastination: Dave, a Yorkshire teenager, signally fails to achieve anything (other than a slipped disc) in his quest to obtain the physical bulk that he is sure will free him from his fear of the schoolyard bullies, and help him win back his lost girlfriend. His imagination is filled with fantasies of the crude cartoon violence and sexual conquests of his bodybuilding heroes, but he rarely situates his own hoped-for competition victories further afield than the nearest miners’ welfare club. Aspirational fantasies mix with bathetic slapstick as Dave struggles to bend his weightlifting belt, and mixes up the milk bottles containing his drinking water with one he has refilled with urine.
2004’s Beef & Yorkshire Pudding saw Dave not getting big (hardly a surprise to the audience, who witness his routine), but instead getting clever and funny. Years on, he is as a stand-up comedian turning his adolescent experiences into material - the character having much in common with Godber himself. Beef 2009, however, offers the audience much gamier meat. Dave, six years older and weighing in at seventeen stone, roars his way through a workout back in his parents’ smelly garage after three ‘wasted’ years spent at a university at which he didn’t fit in. At the same time he slowly reveals to an increasingly uncomfortable audience just who and what needs to be ‘sorted’ at the Pretoria club that evening. Dave has learned that the alternative to being afraid is to be feared: the bullies who once tormented him now court him, worshipping and ‘touching’ (the word is spat out again and again) his bulging biceps. At once enjoying and loathing the attention, he is forced to prove himself in the changing room and on the football pitch, and finally - at a sordid suburban sex party described in unsettling detail - in the bedroom.
While Dave fails magnificently in his desire to be 'big' and clever, John Godber manages to be both. What is surprising is that he is quite so funny along the path towards the play's devastating conclusion.