Gerry & Sewell review, Aldwych Theatre – Geordie football musical is hilarious from start to finish

Geordie football musical Gerry & Sewell begins at the kind of energy levels that a more sedate show might finish with. The second the lights go down, the theatre erupts into a party – a storm of waving black and white flags, haze, and noisy match-day excitement that even a football-sceptic will get swept up in. It’s a lot, but this show really has earned the right to celebrate. It started out tiny, in a Tyneside social club, before snowballing its way into the West End. That doesn’t happen often. And this show’s sheer joyful energy is enough to carry the audience through a patchy but very, very funny story of two ordinary lads with a big goal in sight.

The title’s Gerry and Sewell desperately want season tickets so they can watch their beloved Newcastle United battle its way up the Premier League. But they’re unemployed and broke, and a ticket costs £800. So, of course, they set off on a messy adventure to raise cash by flogging a used toilet, writing songs, and raiding corner shop tills.

Jack Robertson brings a James Corden-esque energy to the role of Sewell, a soft-hearted big bloke who feasts on stolen Maccy D’s, charms his way out of trouble, and can’t resist a cheeky nod to the audience. His mate Gerry is a bit smarter and a lot more troubled – Dean Logan has a nervy likability as this lost boy, who’s breaking under the weight of a horrendous family secret.

Gerry & Sewell is based on Jonathan Tulloch’s novel The Season Ticket – part of a wave of gleefully gritty working-class stories written in the wake of Irvine Welsh’s influential 1993 novel Trainspotting. It’s hard to get the genre’s balance of harrowing realism and crude joys right on stage. And as funny as this show’s offbeat animal puppets and showboating song-and-dance moments are, they sit weirdly alongside the story’s nihilistic trajectory. Gerry and Sewell lark about like they’re in panto, while the beaten and abused women they live alongside are straight out of a harrowing kitchen sink drama.

Still, what Jamie Eastlake’s production really does nail is the humour. It’s hilarious from start to finish, providing you don’t gag at toilet jokes. And it’s also constantly, wittily self-aware of all the tensions of telling a story of poverty and deprivation in front of a middle-class audience: “I’m more of a bastard than anyone in any Ken Loach film,” a job centre official tells Gerry. Its arrival in the West End feels symbolic – a reminder of how ignored British working-class stories have been this century, and how urgently that needs to change.

At the Aldwych Theatre until 24 January