This spring, film crews have been popping up all over Liverpool as director Sam Mendes begins shooting his quartet of Beatles movies – one for each member of the much-obsessed-over Fab Four. But what about the overlooked “fifth Beatle”? A couple of hundred miles south, at London’s Kiln Theatre, the man who quietly shaped the band’s success is getting his moment in the spotlight. Written by Tom Wright, Please Please Me is a lightly salacious exposé of Brian Epstein, the infatuated manager who scrubbed up the band he loved and sold them to the world.
When this shy, smart-suited businessman first ventures down into the Cavern Club, he’s instantly overcome by what he finds: “four towering man boys poured into leather,” rhapsodises Calam Lynch, bringing an intense, repressed sexuality to the awkward Epstein. He’s soon lured away from the family department store, Nems, run by his father (Arthur Wilson) – a man who’s deeply ashamed of his gay son, even though he appreciates his knack for understanding the tastes of the record-buying youth.
Epstein loves The Beatles’ sound, but he knows it’s their look that’ll market them to audiences, so he sands off their rough edges and turns them into something softer, more family-friendly. The kind of boys he could bring home to his father, if his father wasn’t a massive homophobe. And his tender attentions are trained most closely on John Lennon, brought to sarcastic, edgy life by Noah Ritter’s standout performance.
The early scenes feel a little stiff and artificial, padded out with exposition borrowed from the many, many books that have fetishised every detail of the Beatles’ early lives. We hear that Lennon is posher than he pretends, that he’s messed up by his absent mother, and controlled by staunch aunt Mimi (an enjoyably tart Eleanor Worthington-Cox). But that stiltedness melts away in a long, prickly, intimate scene in a Spanish hotel room between Epstein and Lennon. Wright’s so insightful on the way that Epstein’s repression and shame make him vulnerable to being manipulated – as well as on the violence that comes when ostensibly straight men fight down feelings a repressive society won’t let them admit to.
The band that Please Please Me nominally centres on seem weirdly absent from Wright’s story. Without the rights to The Beatles’ music, their genius can only be lightly suggested in David Shrubsole’s cleverly crafted instrumentals, expanding on familiar riffs. Aside from Lennon, the other three Beatles necessarily remain offstage, only occasionally referenced by this play’s hard-working, multi-roling cast. Instead, we get some inconclusive glimpses into the life of another of Epstein’s protegees, Cilla Black (Worthington-Cox) – the relentlessly bubbly singing star who he emotionally leans on and professionally neglects, too stuck on John.
Kiln artistic director Amit Sharma’s staging is fluent and funny, deftly showing the seismic social changes rippling through Lennon and Epstein’s relationship. The passage of time unbuttons them, embitters them, curdles their optimism into a drug-addled kind of self-delusion. Epstein can change the way the band dress, but he can’t change who they are. He can only destroy himself, in a narrative that restores the danger to the endlessly-told story of The Beatles’ unstoppable rise.
‘Please Please Me’ is on at the Kiln Theatre until 29 May