THEATRE REVIEW: Support Your Local Library - Underground At The Old Clubhouse, Buxton.

Billed as a Gothic Rock Opera, this title and premise caught my attention and, being a huge and unashamed fan of Musicals, was looking forward to it. In reality however, it was not a musical at all, but a couple of singer / songwriters, Ruth and Keith, standing in front of us for around 60 minutes, in a very pub live-band-act sort of way, guitars in hand, as they take us through the plot of their supposed opera in an extremely tongue-in-cheek manner, injecting pertinent and /or off-the-wall humour in order to pad out their stage time. 

Ruth is the main storyteller - we are being treated to their idea for an opera which they are hoping to produce on a much larger scale... maybe even on the West End, with a huge budget.... but for now, we have to use our imaginations and listen to just the two of them playing the songs themselves and filling in the story in between. So we learn about the mayor and his daughter in the town of Little Hope. We learn about the residents, who become an angry mob because their children start asking too many questions, and decide to burn down the library. And we learn about the librarian who stops the mob and saves the library from destruction. In between all of this, Ruth also gives us relevant snippets of historical information about libraries, which was a nice idea. Keith concentrates on the more po-faced sardonic style of humour (as opposed to Ruth's chitty-chatty conversational tone), but his interjections seem awkward and out of place. Strange, nay bizarre impersonations, and a silly running thread about the Black Bull pub in Wigan were the mainstay of his contribution.

Unless I have totally missed something important, I have no idea why it is 'gothic'. And it isn't particularly 'rock' either. The music is composed and played on two guitars and sung by the pair, but some of it is folk-style, or even what perhaps might even be labelled as 'easy-listening'. There are some rock riffs and chord structures, but in general the music is extremely pleasant and lyrical. And as for the 'opera' bit, then that's for the big budget show, not this one...!

Presented by 'Black Liver' - yes, that's the name of the production company!, this is a pub gig with dillusions of grandeur. Sometimes funny, always personable, there is an implausible and fatuous thread of a story connecting the comedic songs in this one-hour frivolity.

Reviewer - Matthew Dougall
on - 12.7.22