Music & Lyrics: Jack Dean
Director: Jack Dean
The story of Jeremiah Brandreth leading the Luddite Rebellion is rich with intrigue, passion and tragedy. Brandreth was the last man in Britain to be beheaded by axe for high treason, and yet it’s a tale relatively forgotten, or at best misunderstood. Jack Dean admits that the story fits nicely with his own politics, and it’s a timely one with the cost of living rising and an increasing number of people in poverty. Brandreth and many others like him, working in the Nottinghamshire mills, made their voices heard about the state of the nation in the uprisings of 1817, in the hope of overthrowing the government and wiping out the national debt.
Jack Dean brings the story to the stage in an enjoyable and accessible way, with Brandreth’s story as a musical. Where you might expect folk (and it’s hard to believe that hasn’t already happened…) instead we get a rap re-telling. If Hamilton hadn’t made such an impact on the world of theatre in the past few years, this show would be a brilliant and unexpected revelation. But if the initial sense is that it’s already been done, there’s still something rather satisfying in the way the form fits with this violent, anti-establishment material.
Jeremiah is stripped back, simple storytelling. Design is low key. It relies heavily, and very successfully, on the performance of Dean himself and three great musicians, Yoon-ji Kim on violin and vocals, Beatrice Newman on cello, and Hanno Rigger on guitar and trumpet. Dean inhabits a host of characters in two solid hours of fast paced vocals, mixing it up occasionally with his voice through a megaphone and an answering machine. The musicians create a constant backdrop to all of this with copious use of looping that makes for a rich and rousing soundtrack. Rigger manages to make his one trumpet sound like a brass band.
Video (Tim Reid) on a screen at the back of the stage is effectively (and not over-) used and marries well with Katrin Padel’s lighting design. The projected act numbers and scene titles make for a nice episodic feel to the story, but it’s hard to know why the decision was made to project all of Dean’s lyrics. This is a little distracting. They are superfluous (unless they are there for access reasons?) but it’s hard not to read them rather than just listening.
Jeremiah is a small but ambitious show. It’s longer than it perhaps needs to be (an hour and a half with no interval would certainly give it more impact) but it’s pacy and engaging and there really is a lot to like. With plenty of tour dates (many rescheduled from 2020) in some great small spaces up and down the country, Jeremiah is a show worth looking out for.
Reviewed on 8 May 2022
