The Full Monty

As I mentioned earlier in the week I went to see The Full Monty on Thursday in Brighton. Along with about 15 colleagues, all of whom were female, I braved some serious weather and galloped through my Italian meal in order to see a performance where, it was advertised, the entire male ensemble took their kit off.

I have to say that I really liked the film. It was a thought-provoking piece on the changing nature of gender identity, family and community with some serious points to make about friendship and body issues too. I thought that Robert Carlyle and Mark Addy were brilliant as the best friends whose confidence was shattered when they lost their jobs in a Sheffield Steel Mill. Without jobs and the means to provide for their families the friends reacted very differently. Gaz (Robert Carlyle) proved his masculinity by being unfaithful to his wife who promptly threw him out and replaced him with a steady bloke with a job and Dave (Mark Gaddy) sat around all day and ate his pain away. Disgusted with himself and his weight gain he pushed his adoring wife away convinced she would never want to be intimate with a "fat bastard" like him. Other characters like Gerald (Tom Wilkinson) kept his unemployment secret from his materialistic wife, convinced she would leave him if she realised he was poor and Lomper, the suicidal security guard, who's life revolved around his invalid mother, longed for friendship and love. Although funny and warm the film was also poignant and heart wrenching. The notion that men with nothing to lose could regain their self esteem by bearing all was more of a metaphor for the absolute need for honesty on relationships. It worked beautifully and deservedly won many awards when it was released in 1997.

The stage show was, however a very different animal. For a start it was adapted for Broadway so they changed the setting to Buffalo, New York and the names were Polish instead of Yorkshire names. As the music (Oh yeah! - it was a musical - the cast all sang) was written for that setting we had the weird situation of English actors putting on New York accents on an English stage in a play originally written about Yorkshiremen. This wouldn't have been so bad if the accents were half decent but there were one or two that sounded like they got to Buffalo via Saaaaf (South) London. Yikes! I have to say though that the singing was fantastic. The entire ensemble had amazing voices and the songs were really good.

Where it all went horribly wrong though was the addition of the audience. The problem is that half the assembled multitude thought they were at The Chippendales. The heart of the story, the poignancy and (for me) its strength was lost among the cat-calls and the whistling. The cast were valiant and did their jobs well and with great humour but, alas, the promise of The Full Monty proved too much for quite a few of the 'ladies' present. Not that you can blame them - that's how it's marketed - if you're going to advertise it as though it's just some strip show, it really isn't surprising that that's how it's greeted. More's the pity.

In the end the nudity is strangely not a big deal at all. The show opens with a male stripper, who looks like an underwear catalogue model, plying his trade with consummate professionalism right down to his shiny red thong. He was bronzed and slippery-looking and overwhelmingly plastic. By comparison, the six steel workers (pasty, skinny, chubby or just plain ordinary) were, bizarrely, gloriously attractive. It didn't take long to get over the butt cheeks because there is something wonderfully humorous about the human body. It was the plastic stripper that jarred. And as for the end - the big reveal? Well that was done in front of a big bright lighting board on which The Full Monty was emblazoned, casting our six friends into silhouette and thereby protecting their modesty and sparing them the inevitable comparisons with their fellow cast members' members. Thank God!

I had a good night. The show wasn't bad at all and really the music was very good. I have to admit to blushing on several occasions but I think my discomfort was because I was with work colleagues whom I barely knew. It's a bit like when a rude bit comes on in a film and your granny's in the room. But all in all it was entertaining and a bit of a giggle. I'd give it a 6 and 1/2 out of 10.