71 Coltman Street, review: funny but frustrating chronicle of a zesty theatrical adventure

“We were never that popular in Hull – we only got popular when we got national press reviews,” Mike Bradwell, the founder of Hull Truck, confided when I touched base with him about 71 Coltman Street.

This new play by Richard Bean, celebrates, in a Covid-delayed fashion, the 50th anniversary of the company’s inception in 1971, in a rundown rented house near the fish docks. Bean is the prolific geezer who gave us One Man, Two Guvnors. Every so often he turns his dramatic attention to his home town. He has tackled the life of trawlermen, and the prison riot of 1976; now he tries to convey the original adventurous zest of a company which these days occupies a fancy building a 20-minute walk from its birthplace. Does his customary theatrical verve ensure that Hull Truck’s earliest endeavours finally find retrospective favour with local denizens?

On the evidence of the affectionate laughter I heard around me, with direction by Mark Babych, I’d say yes. “That was completely brilliant,” I overheard one punter saying. Bradwell has endorsed it too.

I don’t wish to be a party-pooper. I was often amused. But diligently and irreverently crafted though Bean’s act of imaginative reconstruction is, it strikes me as being all cod and no chips. Hull Truck was a trail-blazer on the touring experimental scene – it was the first fringe company to present a show at the new National theatre. Bean shows it gaining impact at a local level, but not how it came to matter further afield.

His focus on bare-bones beginnings also rules out some of the gems found in Bradwell’s memoir, a part-inspiration for him, such as the time Beat poet Allen Ginsberg joined them for a kids show only to be pelted by Coke cans.

A sense of static enclosure is writ large from the start, when a woozy exchange on a living-room sofa involving a couple of stoners reveals itself as a work-in-progress involving improvised characters – Bradwell wanted his actors as immersed in their roles as possible, a DIY “Method” approach. Whatever’s happening beyond the outside telephone box that serves as an office barely impinges; there’s no discussion of current events, say. This being a harsh winter, and the fan-heater broken (a cue for one of a number of live coltish rock numbers), they’ve resorted to burning bits of furniture to stay warm.

Bean dives into the giro-funded grottiness of it all with aplomb but doesn’t fully unpick the motivations and aspirations binding the cohort together. Aside from love trouble between Kieran Knowles’s bearded, earnest Bradwell and fed-up actress Linda (Lauryn Redding), it’s fairly low-heat in terms of personal drama.

The stage comes to its most riotous life during a bonkers, typically bawdy cabaret hour and at each appearance by Joanna Holden, playing the formidable landlady Mrs Snowball. She’s like a Hyacinth Bucket of Hull, with a dash of feral aggression that leaves a hapless male food company rep fending her off in the funniest scene. Some of the local in-jokes inevitably went over my head. Entirely intelligible, though, is the two-word expletive from John Cleese (fact!) sent in response to a begging letter from the troupe. All the same, with the theatre still trucking, you could at least say that Bradwell and co had the last laugh.

Until March 12. Tickets: 01482 323638; hulltruck.co.uk