Tabloid!!!

Description

It was after the 1979 election that Margaret Thatcher was said to have mis-spoke the immortal lines of Francis of Assisi…

“Where there is peace, let there be strife,

Where there is love, let there be hate,

Where there is hunger, let there be greed,

Where there is knowledge, let there be ignorance,

Where there is life, let there be death”

… and whilst it would be naive to suggest that the state of Britain’s politics and civic life ever since has been entirely down to her, she certainly left her mark over the following decades.

Fast forward to 1995, and Liverpool was about to witness the birth of a significant new cultural educational presence: the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts (LIPA). Paul McCartney’s fame school (as it rapidly was referred to) was launched to a media storm at the time with international students arriving in the city and mixing it with local students and the city’s cultural moguls in sometimes easy, sometimes awkward alignments. But mix it they well and truly did, despite the building not being ready on time. Whilst this was especially awkward for those students who had flown across the planet to be there, many opportunities opened for them and the resident staff of LIPA which allowed for some inspiring cultural experiences which had the added benefit of not needing to be assessed by LIPA’s assessment protocols. Perhaps for the first and only time in LIPA’s history, we were able to produce art without having to measure the state of students’ learning outcomes.

One of these was a new musical written and produced by Gary Carpenter and Nick Owen: Tabloid!!! Gary and Nick had been Heads of Music and Community Arts at LIPA at the time and used the hiatus between students arriving and classes starting by producing the musical at Liverpool’s Unity Theatre. Its first performance was Friday 13 October 1995 so we think it’s fitting, to celebrate the 29th birthday of the production by publishing the full script this week.

Tabloid!!! is based on the Guy De Maupassant novel, Bel Ami, which is set in Paris in the late 1880s. We transposed the story to the London of the late 1980s and found an easy equivalence between the challenges that the French ‘Bel Ami’ found on his return from the war in Algeria and our hero, Roy Bellamy and his return from the Falklands. We were, after all, dealing with a period when corruption in the press, in politics, in the economy was rife. We were in the dog days of ‘Greed is Good’ and ‘loadsamoney’ attitudes and so the story lent itself to a timely interpretation and production.

Fast forward to 2024, and despite the new hope of the new Labour administration following their election in July, an uneasy stench of corruption and sleaze is beginning to drift up out of the gutters again: the ‘effluence of affluence‘ (as Gary wrote in the opening number to the show) is making its mark again