Good Golly Miss Molly at the New Vic: a harmonious vision of social turmoil

The action of Bob Eaton’s rock’n’roll musical ricochets around “nostalgia night” in a Stoke-on-Trent working men’s club, following its characters, led by the eponymous Molly, to and fro across the decades from the late Queen’s Coronation in 1953 to 1989. It is a trip down memory lane, also, for many in the audience at the New Vic.

The UK’s first purpose-built theatre-in-the-round is marking its 40th anniversary by restaging some of the shows that have furthered its founding artistic director’s vision of creating theatre that belongs to its community, “indigenous without being parochial”. It was Peter Cheeseman, pioneer of documentary theatre, who commissioned Eaton to create a musical based on a local story, to be performed by a company of actor/musicians (now a common practice but, back then, innovative – explored by Eaton in an earlier show, Lennon, at Liverpool Everyman). After its 1989 premiere, Good Golly Miss Molly was staged twice again at the New Vic in the early 1990s, then transferred to London’s West End.

The Victoria Street Residents’ Association Nostalgia night is a fundraiser for the campaign against the demolition of their homes. Coincidentally, this same evening, the council is meeting to decide whether to send in the wreckers. As we wait to hear the result, we zip back through Molly’s life to this moment, bouncing between 23 songs and at least as many vignettes illustrating relationships and social changes: in marriage, education, contraception, women’s status in the workplace, gay visibility (Aids, in passing), the 1984 miners’ strike …

The show’s past jabs into our present when Molly repeatedly demands of a council housing officer (former bandmate Eddie): “Who gets to decide?” Whether it is housing or water, the people most affected still have least say and the best hope lies in standing by one another.

Eaton himself directs the superbly harmonised and gloriously harmonising 10-strong ensemble, with special mention to Shirley Darroch’s Molly and original cast member Richard Hague as grumpy Grandad and tipsy barman).

Photograph by Andrew Billington

Good Golly Miss Molly is at the New Vic, Newcastle-under-Lyme, until 2 May