Review: GERRY & SEWELL, Aldwych Theatre
Photo credit: Von Fox Promotions
While Gerry & Sewell captures the raw, high-octane energy of obsessive football fandom and lands more than a few decent laughs, it never quite reaches the heights to be considered a truly insightful working class stage adaptation.
Based on Jonathan Tulloch’s novel The Season Ticket, which became the cult film Purely Belter, Gerry & Sewell arrives in the West End for a limited run of performances after receiving acclaim in its native north-east of England.
The piece centres around two lads from Gatehead, who see robbing and conning their way to pay for a Newcastle United season ticket as their route out of the monotony of life and, ultimately, poverty.
Jamie Eastlake’s script shows Gateshead in a pretty bleak light. Gerry comes from a fractured home shadowed by a dark family past, while Sewell, still wearing the same bench coat he’s had since he was 12, cheerfully wades into the Tyne in search of scrap metal to sell. It is a world of deprivation rendered with blunt force rather than subtlety.
There is plenty to admire. The production pulses with infectious energy, nowhere more so than in its rousing opening, which invites the audience to wave oversized Newcastle United flags while the cast whip the theatre into a chanting “black and white army”.
Jack Robertson’s Sewell delivers much of the evening’s best humour, and the set - framing the Tyne-Wear rivalry through a stylised Metro line linking St James’ Park and the Stadium of Light - is impressive for a production of this scale.
Yet as the play unfolds, its portrayal of working-class life begins to feel uncomfortably thin. Too many characters slide into familiar tropes: the single mother dreaming aloud (and in song) of escape; the joyless teacher; the violent father whose abuse is sketched without interrogation or consequence. What might have been textured social realism instead drifts towards caricature.
While there is much to enjoy, there are unfortunately too many misfires to consider it a genuine insight into working class life or culture.
The most jarring moment comes - and this is hardly a spoiler, given the timeframe of 2019–21 - with the sale of Newcastle United by Mike Ashley to the Saudi Public Investment Fund. The play presents the takeover as salvation, indulging fantasies of limitless wealth and marquee signings, while carefully sidestepping the bloody source of that money.
Saudi Arabia is never named; its human rights record never acknowledged. Watching working class fans celebrate the financial muscle of a brutal regime without a hint of context or unease feels not just naïve, but wilfully evasive.
Gerry & Sewell has its moments, and probably enough to make it a worthwhile endeavour. But it stops short of offering the honesty or depth that would make it truly resonant. Compared with Beth Steel’s wonderful depiction of working class life in Till The Stars Come Down or Alex Hill’s insight into football fan culture with Why I Stuck a Flare Up My Arse for England, this is a story that never quite hits those marks.
*** Three stars
Reviewed by: Tom Ambrose
Gerry & Sewell plays at the Aldwych Theatre until 24 January, with further information here.
