Director, Composer, and Playwright Andy McGregor follows up his 2022 triumph Crocodile Rock, with Battery Park another theatrical journey back into the 90’s. It’s not a musical, but it is a play with more music than you can shake two sticks at and a heartfelt ode to the Britpop era.
Tracked down to a Greenock Bowling Club bar by Lucy (Chloe-Ann Tyler), Tommy (Chris Alexander), a 40-something survivor of the zero-hours economy, is persuaded to revisit his youth as a musical ‘almost-was’. Lucy has a dissertation to complete, and Tommy’s former band, Battery Park is her chosen subject. The result is a nostalgic tragicomedy, following a teenaged Tommy (Stuart Edgar) from shift work in the local IBM factory, as he, his brother Ed (Tommy McGowan), and best pal Biffy (Charlie West), join forces to play their first gig.
McGregor weaves a grand story, creating a trio of personalities immediately recognisable to fellow survivors of pre-internet male post-pubescence. Tommy, bright, shy but precious about his music; Ed, big-mouthed, big-hearted and self-destructive; and Biffy, who hides a kind soul behind an oafish facade.
When Angie (also Tyler) takes a shine to nascent pop star Tommy, romance beckons. She has more than enough ambition for both of them, a budding music journalist with a natural eye for talent. Angie also has just the front-woman for the band, recognising that Tommy is more Gary Barlow than Robbie Williams. Kim Allan’s recovering private school-girl Robyn soon takes the mic, and success follows.
Battery Park finds plenty of laughs in the band’s adventures and misadventures, from Ed’s labelling of Tommy’s look as ‘haunted accountant’, to Biffy’s inexplicable rallying cry of ‘I am the Catman!’ The band’s female contingent, more urbane by a country mile, make sarcastically merry, leaving no one (correctly) in doubt of which tends to be the more sophisticated sex.
Images from Battery Park – © Mihaela Bodlovic
So far, so joyous, the play peppered with the band’s first performances of songs that will someday feature on their first, and only album. The music certainly rings true to the 90’s sound, the songs bouncing around somewhere between Oasis, James, and Blur. Perhaps you won’t be whistling them all the way home, but the musicianship is solid, and the resulting set would delight the most demanding local gig supporters. Dramatically, the cast is also uniformly solid, with rising star Tyler turning in another stand-out, sophisticated performance in particular.
The sound design, on the other hand, is just a touch muddy here and there, the vocals sometimes swamped to the point of complete unintelligibility. It blunts Allan’s introduction to the group, in particular, removing the transformative quality of her vocal gifts.
Nevertheless, McGregor choreographs each aspect of Battery Park very well indeed. The comedy, drama, and music are well integrated, with no conversation or performance included except to drive the story onward. The pace of the play in particular, conveys the abrupt shift from pipedreams to a chance of real, life-transforming opportunity. Pressures mount, as well as recreational temptations, and when Ed falls more and more under the spell of the latter, disaster beckons for everyone involved.
The shifts between now and then are handled well, the time spent in the present is focused on building the relationship between Tommy and his interviewer. Battery Park has no interest, or need to create Greenock 2023, so it doesn’t bother, leaving Kenneth MacLeod to transform a theatrical stage into one better suited to live music. The 90’s however, is manifested in every aspect of our young musicians’ lives, not just the music, but their cultural references, clothes, slang, and a well-judged lack of modern political correctness.
This isn’t a caricature of another era, just a warm-hearted look back in love.
Of course, Battery Park begins by telling you the band didn’t make it, so failure is inevitable. Talent and potential popularity aren’t the problem, so McGregor poisons the chalice with addiction and fraternal loyalty. If Battery Park is a love letter to Britpop and a pre-streaming music industry, it also demonstrates the power of addiction to blight lives beyond the addict’s own. This isn’t to say Tommy’s perfect, and in some ways he just hides his own self-destruction behind his brother’s. There’s a promising subtlety to McGregor’s writing, well-illustrated in Tommy as a character easy to be frustrated for, and at.
McGregor is kind enough, however, to offer the older, wiser Tommy something resembling a second chance, without collapsing into a Disney-esque finale. Rousing, charming, funny, and poignant, Battery Park is a well-judged musical crowdpleaser.
Battery Park is a co-production of Sleeping Warrior Theatre Company with Beacon Arts Centre.
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