Writer: Emily Woof
Director: Hamish McColl
The opening scene of Revolver sees a TV researcher declare to the audience that she has a gun, after recounting an angry exchange with a woman about the Bible. It’s a flashback scene used in TV drama style to make audiences wonder how things reached this point of anger and rage after the story switches to events from one week earlier.
The story that follows initially seems to have little obvious connection to this as she works through her mother’s belongings to get material she can use for a documentary she has pitched to a producer she has also slept with in spite of not originally intending to.
The documentary is about female fandom, which fits with her mother’s teenage obsession with John Lennon, something that led to her leaving her Northern home and moving to London in 1966 where she writes to Lennon and waits for him to come back from what would be the Beatles last US tour.
There is a lot of humour and acute observation in this side of the story, as her mother and others like her are brought to vivid life in a narrative that mixes teenage naivety with a belief that you are far more worldly wise and experienced than you actually are. Using songs from The Beatles Revolver album as accompaniment also sets the mood of the period as the transformation of the world’s first boy band to something more mature mirrors the loss of post-war innocence and consensus around the world.
However, alarm bells ring slightly when the main footage shown to accompany this is of the Beatles arrival in the US in 1964, when the publicity from the original London run of the show claims it is set ‘As The Beatles tour to America for the first time’ and when the mother’s fandom and screaming seems to belong more the early years of the Beatles than the 66 version. It is an issue that grows as the show progresses and it seems that Woof is either taking too many liberties with the time frame, or just not doing enough research into what she’s writing about.
The third story strand comes when the mother is introduced to the world of Valerie Solanas, who went on to shoot Andy Warhol and led S.C.U.M an acronym that stood for The Society For Cutting Up Men. Woof tries to link the story of Solanas with the story of the researcher as her ideas for the documentary are twisted out of shape by the producer into something that treats the women as objects rather than looking at them in any depth.
The problem is that it doesn’t work. It is too big a leap in the story in the 60s as it suddenly moves the mother and the show into a different world, and the parallels between Solanas and the researcher stories are overplayed. While not seeming as if it has come entirely out of nowhere, the anger and rage demonstrated at the start of the show and returned to with visceral force at the end feel like they are at a scale that has not been earned by what has gone before, and the whole thing feels like an ill-fated attempt to make connections that don’t exist.
Runs until 25 August (not 18th) 2025 | Image: Sheila Burnett
