Writer: Lee Mattinson
Director: Liz Stevenson
There are some wonderful moments in this play about the forgotten, broken steel town Workington in West Cumbria. The ending is thrillingly played and lit and features singing from the Steel Community Choir, while an earlier dance between two strangers is achingly sad. However, the framing story – a deliberately modern fairy tale – about a lost document doesn’t do Steel any favours.
James and Kamran, both 17, work in Burger King. Karman prepares the meals, but having failed his Food Hygiene Test countless times, James cleans the toilets. But this Friday is different. It’s interrupted by a kiss – a Salterbeck Kiss, the local vernacular for a head butt – and then by James’s drunk father who tells his son that a posh woman is looking for him.
Accompanied by Kamran, James meets the mysterious woman who tells him that his “Great-great-great grandad George…owns a mile of British railway track.” Network Rail wants it back and is happy to pay a million pounds for it. All James needs to provide is the original contract from 1904; otherwise, National Rail won’t pay and will just take over the line instead. Linda gives James 12 hours to find it.
The boys run all over town trying to find the contract; they search in attics, scan the local pubs for James’s relatives and visit the house of his uncle he never knew existed. The story is pretty outlandish, but it allows writer Lee Mattinson to make observations about the town’s inhabitants, all affected in some way by the shutdown of the steel plants and the coal mines.
The vignettes of pub-life where the young men all look the same in their white t-shirts and skinny jeans (“photocopies of photocopies of photocopies of lads”) and where a pregnant woman celebrates her news with “a circle of lads’ are more interesting than the hunt for a fragile sheet of paper. And while some of these observations about the pubs’ customers are very funny, they are never cruel. These people are trying to make the best of their lives in a town scarred by unemployment and austerity.
Jordan Tweddle, who plays James, manages to get to the heart of the story in Steel’s last third. His face shines with tears as he confronts his history – family and local – in the queer pub that was once full of steel workers. As well as playing Kamran, Suraj Shah has to be all the other characters from James’s Dad to Steel Magnolia, the drag queen performing at the queer bar. For comedy’s sake, all the characters are larger than life.
With so many characters and with the breakneck speed at which the two actors play them, at times it’s difficult to keep up with the story, especially when it flashbacks to a sexual encounter between the boys. Steel is a courageous attempt to pack in over a century of Workington’s history in 85 minutes, and the actors work extremely hard, but ultimately, there are too many strands in this play about the left-behinds.
Runs until 14 June 2025
