Think of being 17 again, and then think of being 17 and finding out you could inherit a million pounds. Would this life-changing amount of money give you the power to be who you always wanted?Summary
Rating
Excellent
Coming to the end of its UK tour, Steel continues to be an 80-minute wonder that packs a punch. After its premiere last year at Keswick’s Theatre By The Lake, Liz Stevenson and Lee Mattinson bring to the foreground the forgotten generations of steelwork towns and the butterfly effect of the de-industrialisation within them.
Steel centres on two seventeen year old boys from Workington, Cumbria, who are on a race to find a life-changing document that could make one of them heir to a mile stretch of steel railway and in turn a millionaire. With just 12 hours to find it, James (Jordan Tweddle) and Kamran (Suraj Shah) take us on a journey through the post-industrial town of Workington and all it has to offer, or better yet, hasn’t to offer. We discover, as James does, fragmented pieces of his life that he was all too unaware of. Parts that allow him to start to make sense of who he truly is and everything he was longing to be.
Tweddle pitches his performance to a tee, and Shah makes a fine theatre debut playing Kamran and the oddities of characters they meet along the way. Both have some stellar one-liners from Mattinson that you can only imagine coming out of a 17 year olds unfiltered mouth. Tweddle brings a naivety to the part of a young lad who knows no better than living within the four walls of the same house and working at Burger King. The type of young lad that society can too often dismiss. Tweddle nurtures his character’s inner turmoil and you can see the struggle of his own reluctance to accept what Kamran is telling us to be true.
In various interviews Mattinson discusses his collation of research and how this play came about (you can read more in our recent interview with him here). To understand 17 year olds of today, Mattinson did workshops across secondary schools within Cumbria. Knowing this, I would like to think that when Kamran says ‘Think of ten really middle class things’, that their exhaustive list including ‘Yoghurt’ and ‘Mushroom Risotto’ is verbatim. His choice to make the character of Kamran South Asian adds the finely interwoven theme of racial stigma in a predominately white working class town. Mattinson has said that he ran a series of workshops with Anti Racist Cumbria to develop this theme, while the deep connection to the steelworks industry is evident, with Mattinson’s father having been a part of it.
What Mattinson has created not only pays homage to his hometown and the people and places that are still facing the loss of the steelworks industry, but also gives a voice to the new generation. With that new generation comes a new set of struggles, and set against the backdrop of the bigoted opinions of this post-industrial town being, or feeling like you are different, can become a dangerously isolating experience. Mattinson creates a world where these teenagers are given a life-changing opportunity and that sudden agency brings them a power that you can feel across the room.
Ending its current tour at The Park Theatre there is certainly a potential future life for this production and everything it has to offer.
Written by: Lee Mattinson
Directed by: Liz Stevenson
Associate Director: Mark Macey
Design by: Simon Kenny
Sound Design by: Mark Melville
Lighting Design by: Jessie Addinall
Movement Direction by: Kieran Sheehan
Steel plays at Park Theatre until Saturday 14 June.
