Scotland

Keli – Royal Lyceum Theatre

Keli is writer and composer, Martin Green’s response to his adopted community and its music. The writer moved to a small mining town in the South of Scotland and became fascinated by the relationship between the brass band and the pit. The mines were of course long gone, but the music remained and had become an emblem of continuity and resilience, where ‘the band is the toon, and the toon is the band’.

At the centre of life Green’s a fictitious small mining town is Keli, a troubled and foul-mouthed young lady with few prospects, an anxiety-ridden mother and a dead-end job stacking shelves. The one good thing in her life is the band, and when she picks up the tenor horn, she becomes a different person, somehow empowered and necessary. When she blows those few inches of air it is the one thing she feels she can really control.

Liberty Black plays the lead brilliantly, with a sort of ferocious feral disregard for everyone around her that makes you believe if not necessarily root for the character. In that respect, Keli is very much an anti-hero, a sort of rusty residue of what is left when a town is dying.

The story is told as a series of flashbacks after Keli falls into an abandoned pit and bumps into an ancient minor – musician. Billy Mack puts in a fine turn as the ghost of mining and music past stuck in an underground purgatory, using long forgotten language and referring to Keli as ‘sister comrade’. This might sound fanciful but in the capable hands of Mack it is pulled off with aplomb, aided in no small part by Alisa Kalyanova’s creative set design, and Robbie Butler’s sensitive lighting. The echoed conversations between the two make you wonder if civilisation is moving forward or backwards, Keli’s expletive laden sentences clashing with old man yesterday’s powerful messages of socialism, love and respect for your fellow man and woman.

Music is riven through this piece and not just of the brass band variety, there are some fine sensitive ballads in there as well.

Whilst a lot of this works well, there are too many moments which jar. Green’s script is very wordy and comes at you with a pace and shouty anger which at times creates a sort of aural claustrophobia. The play’s language is also problematic, as it seems to only be the working-class characters who use the f or the c-word. Is it because they are permanently angry or is Green suggesting that poor people are naturally inclined to swear – all the time! And do we really need that joke about Suella Braverman?

Many of the characters here, particularly the posh ones (who never swear!), come across as little more than stereo-typical caricatures. Which is a shame.

Tellingly, it is only in the final moments of the play, when the Whitburn and Kingdom bands fill the stage, and the sonorous music of the massed brass band swells, that the one truly spine-tingling moment of the play occurs.

Reviewer: Greg Holstead

Reviewed: 15th May 2025

North West End UK Rating: