It must be hard to write a play about nice people.
For one thing, nice people aren’t dramatic. Mostly nice people don’t like to kick up a fuss or behave impossibly or stir up trouble. Nice people like things nice and easy, nice and peaceful, nice and calm. Generally they aren’t that interesting from a theatrical perspective.
It’s not that nice people don’t have flaws. We all know they can be overly polite, annoyingly self-deprecating and diffident to the point of disappearing into the wallpaper. They can even take nice to extremes, and extremely nice people can make the rest of us want to scream and kick walls and punch the cute little nose of the nearest available Labrador puppy (that’s not a confession by the way, or a recommendation, it’s just poetic license – your cuddly little canine is quite safe around this website, honest.) Nice people’s foibles can be a minor irritation, certainly, but they are rarely capable of winding the mainspring of tragic heroism.
Nice people tend to be losers too. But they don’t get driven to magnificent defeat taking a stand against overwhelming odds. Nice people just give up, acceptingly, with a shrug rather than a shaken fist.
It’s hard to do justice to nice people on stage.
But somehow Tom Wells has managed to write a really good play about nice people. Jumpers For Goalposts is about Barely United who come bottom of the table in the Hull Gay and Lesbian Five-a-Side Football League, where they play against Tranny United, Man City and Lesbian Rovers – the team that kicked out Barely’s Captain, Viv (Vivienne Gibbs) for belligerent bossiness (Viv is the only character in the play who displays the slightest shadow side to her generally sunny disposition.) The rest of Barely United are playing for fun not glory, or as Viv puts it, brandishing a copy of Coaching For Dummies at them, “titting about with your mates”.
Viv wants the team to take the competition seriously. She also wants to cheer up her depressed, bereaved brother in law – the teams “token straight” – Joe. Matt Sutton plays the desolated Joe beautifully. He’s really just going through the motions, putting on a good face, but his heart really isn’t in it – in fact his heart’s going to give out if he neglects the training regimen that Viv is keen to enforce.
Beardy Geoff (Andy Rush) is a busker and aspiring “gay icon” looking for the perfect song for Hull Pride and plotting to bed “them lads, Man City”, which he admits is his main reason for playing. He won’t remove his woolly bobble hat. He was attacked recently – gay bashed – and it covers up the scar. Geoff gets some of the funniest lines. If you sing Go West at a Gay Pride Festival in Hull, he wonders, are you actually encouraging people to go to Manchester?
The play is an unconventional “rom-com” – not many romantic comedies take place in a shabby, dreary changing room up North – where the romance is supplied by Danny (Jamie Samuel), a student with a secret he doesn’t want to talk about (not hard to guess what it is), and tongue-tied librarian Luke (Philip Duguid-McQuillian). Luke doesn’t manage one complete fully-formed sentence in the whole play – it’s a masterful performance and a real joy to watch – until he reads from his diary that is. Only really nice people write diaries (Alastair Campbell doesn’t count … and Giles Brandreth and Joseph Goebells and … ok, that last observation doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Bad people keep diaries to keep track of their evil deeds I suppose.)
The gay romance is handled sensitively – though the lady in front of me in the theatre did audibly gasp and shudder at the kiss, which made me chuckle – even if Danny and Luke are possibly too damned sweet to be true.
Jumpers for Goalposts is gentle without being cloying, funny without going for the obvious gags, and sharply observed without descending into meanness. Tom Wells obviously likes people, and I can’t imagine him having a cynical bone in his body. Which is genuinely nice.