Shakers: Under New Management review – zero-hours Godber spikes the punch

Playwrights Jane Thornton and John Godber first staged Shakers in 1985, a point when the escapism of working-class new romanticism was morphing into the cynicism of loadsamoney Thatcherism. At the start of the decade, working as a waitress in a cocktail bar seemed glamorous to the Human League; by the end, satirising a brutish love of money seemed necessary for Harry Enfield. Thornton and Godber’s play, set on the night shift of a glitzy, raucous and superficial cocktail bar, straddled those eras of escapism and excess.

Nearly 40 years on, you’ll be lucky to find a bar that’s open, never mind raucous. Down the road from Wakefield’s Theatre Royal, the Elephant and Castle is on the market and, on a Tuesday night, pubs are either sleepy or shut. That is why the considerably rewritten Shakers: Under New Management is a much darker cocktail than before.

For punters and staff alike, the nightlife it describes has an edge of desperation. The customers are trying to forget the same economic pressures that drive the bartenders to accept zero-hours contracts, abusive working conditions and expensive late-night taxis just to keep safe. This lot even have to stump up for their Christmas party.

All this puts the onus on actors Jazmine Franks, Yasmin Dawes and Rebecca Tebbett to keep up the buoyancy levels in Godber’s production. True to the times, even the cast has been downsized from four to three. Not only do they have to take on the comic grotesques of leery lads, boozy teachers, arrogant toffs and underage drinkers, they also have to remind us of the cost-of-living crisis, post-Covid insecurity and the rightwing fundamentalism driving abortion legislation in the US.

Brash and funny, they do a valiant job, but there is a bleakness in this 2022 vision of Shakers that makes it less a knockabout comedy of drink-fuelled human life than an angry, angsty broadside on behalf of a lost generation. As the actors switch deftly from rampant drinker to exhausted worker, it feels like the play is battling with itself; it would dearly love to give us a good time – and often does – but the imminent hangover of Truss’s Britain keeps putting a dampener on the party.

• At Theatre Royal, Wakefield, until 17 September and touring until 12 November.