This isn’t a review, rather it’s some brief thoughts on the Preview performance of Keli by composer, and musician, Martin Green. Essentially a love letter to Green’s year spent immersed in brass banding, the show culminated with an excerpt — performed live — from the audio-drama Keli born of his experiences, précised by exposition of his creative journey to its realisation.
The undoubted stars of the night were Whitburn Band, the 11th best brass band in the world as I type. They played the audience in, even taking requests, and provided a marvellous sound machine to soundtrack the evening, the score provided by the manifestly talented Green himself.
The pre-intermission segment was a quasi-documentary of Green’s year spent with communities born of a now dead mining industry, and the brass bands, born amidst coal dust, which survive. Backed by the Whitburn Band, Green adopted a proselytizing air connecting his new, if long-historied muses to the present day via the recent pardons granted by the Scottish Government to workers wrongly charged with striking related offences during the 80’s.
Welling up from his new sympathies for all things brass, is Keli (Anna Russell-Martin), his fictional protagonist, teenaged-tenor horn prodigy, and troubled youth. Introductions made pre-break, the audience returned from the intermission to witness an excerpt from the forthcoming audio-drama Keli in which his creation takes centre stage. Also featuring the ever resplendent Tam Dean Burn, as an immortal miner and tenor horn player, it would be unfair to say much prior to Keli’s formal premier later in the month. That said, and without intending to be cruel, the script as seen is prone to lecturing monologue, and nigh-caricature. Both actors are brilliant as always, but there’s only so much a thespian’s talents can achieve in isolation.
In the final reckoning, it’s not clear what Keli brings to the conversation, that the 1996 film, Brassed Off didn’t communicate with some charm more than 20 years ago. Passion is an integral part of good theatre in every guise, and Green has it in abundance for all things “valved”, and brassy. Passion alone, however, can never subsidise a lack of fresh perspective, or mastery of the playwrights toolbox. Maybe the full audio-drama will be a revelation, and if so I’ll be the first to rejoice in the consumption of my words.
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