“The Band Back Together” at the Arcola Theatre
Tom Bolton in East London
9 September 2024
In the basement studio at the Arcola Theatre, instruments are set up for a band rehearsal. Joe (James Westphal) is playing a song to himself on the keyboards, when Ellie (Laura Evelyn) walks in. We soon realize they’ve not seen each other for many years, and Joe has invited his former bandmates back to Salisbury for a reunion gig. When Ross (Royce Cronin) eventually shows up, no one seems sure they want to be there. Can a group of friends recapture the hope and excitement of being young, or is it a terrible idea?
Barney Norris’s new play (which he also directs) combines conventional drama with songs, performed live by a group of actors who have some impressive musical skills. They combine covers with original songs devised by the cast. Each band member has their moment. Joe’s song reveals his loneliness since the band (we never learn their name, except that they didn’t like it) broke up. Ellie, at a personal crossroads, delivers an excellent version of Tom Waits’s “Take It with Me”, a beautiful song about legacies. Ross, the only one with a professional music career, sings The Cure’s “In Between Days”, which seems to be about his brief, unresolved relationship with Ellie.
But Ellie and Joe were together too, and as the band members talk a hidden story emerges, and we discover that a corrosive secret has been lurking over the years since they last met.
The Band Back Together has strong elements, but a problem with its structure. The play is two hours’ long with an interval, but the first half, dominated by the awkwardness of people who don’t know how to talk to one another anymore, drifts. When the second half arrives, the play gains momentum and emotional charge, to the extent that the first half seems redundant. The music and themes work together, injecting energy. It feels as though a tighter work is struggling to get out.
Norris also identifies intriguing themes, but they feel underdeveloped. The gig is supposedly a Novichok benefit gig, harking back to the 2018 Salisbury poisonings. The characters treat this as a joke, but the question of what happened to Salisbury when the world’s cameras left deserves exploration. So does the concept of the city as the place that, as Ross puts it, “everyone imagines they come from”.
The rootlessness of people from a small English town, and their struggles to forge an identity for themselves, seem like important themes, but would benefit from greater examination. The trio of protagonists, tied together by the past and dark personal secrets, echoes the structure of Brian Friel’s masterpiece Faith Healer. Friel’s characters were pushed to the physical margins, the forgotten towns of the far north. That the equivalent could now be Salisbury, a damaged place at the heart of England’s dreaming, is an intriguing concept.
Cronin, Evelyn, and Westphal give engaging performances, and bring out the hollowness that hangs over these thirtysomethings. Very few can make a living from music in the 21st century, and even Ross has been forced to exchange creativity for hack work. The characters are forced to face the probability that their late teens really were the best time in their lives. The Band Back Together is an entertaining, but flawed evening, in which the characters express themselves most eloquently through other people’s music.
