Good Vibrations – a live score from a wonderful ensemble cast in this celebration of alternatives (Grand Opera House until Saturday 20 May + Irish Arts Center in New York from 14 June)

It’s easier to write about real people being portrayed on stage when they aren’t in the room.

The Terri Hooley depicted in Good Vibrations is equal parts hero and villain. He’s a gift to Belfast and beyond, though not necessarily a delight for everyone who loved or worked for him (and there’s a fair overlap between those two groups).

He’s portrayed as someone who wouldn’t – in fact, doesn’t have a bone in his body that knows how to – conform to the binary identities on offer when the Troubles start. He’s someone with a positive and rebellious ambition for the city he lives in, with a sense how the shared purpose of producing music and enjoying listening to it keeps people together. Yet the Terri on stage is also shown to be exasperatingly poor at managing his expanding suite of businesses.

He’s a promoter, an encourager, a dealmaker, a prophet, a husband and a father, but puts neither family nor fortune before fun and a feverish impetuousness that risks all he has to create a legacy of art and creativity. The cost is tearfully visible on the stage of the Grand Opera House. The ‘godfather of punk’ is quite a tragic figure, and the Lyric Theatre’s revival of the stage production of Good Vibrations is all the better for accepting that painful fact and threading it through the heart of the story. The man’s also an inspiration for turning up at opening nights and so graciously allowing his story to be simplified, tailored and tweaked for the fictional yet probably never too far from the truth version in Colin Carberry and Glenn Patterson’s stage adaptation of their 2013 film screenplay.

The two sides to Terri conspire to make wonderful drama. The war outside the door of his Great Victoria Street (nicknamed ‘bomb alley’) shop adds violent menace that puts any argy-bargy between punk bands’ egos into perspective. (What the theatre show can’t depict is the noteworthy brevity of the time between punk’s rise and its fall. And it’s on audience faces and in snatches of conversation overheard in the theatre bars that you realise the tightness with which so many involved in the scene back in the day cling to their memories, and how the modern punk scene continues to reinvent and still refuses to conform.)

The ensemble cast for this actor-muso production throw themselves into the shoes of some of the early punk bands – particularly Rudi, the Outcasts, and the Undertones. Other than sound effects and the odd piece of incidental music, everything is performed and sung live. Watch the cast’s mouths moving as they perform in harmony while pushing flight cases across the stage between scenes. It’s a much less raucous sound mix (thank you Ian Vennard) than the original version staged in the Lyric back in 2018, and it really allows the emotion and the lyrics to retain their power rather than letting rock and rhythm overwhelm.

Glen Wallace eases into the role of the central figure, happy go lucky, then haphazard. His fine voice is a revelation during one of the final songs, Laugh With Me, and if you sign up for one of Dolores Vischer’s wonderful Belfast punk music walking tours (there are some scheduled for Saturday 13 and 20 May) you’ll discover just how favourably Wallace compares with the real man’s vocal cords back in 1979/80!

Jayne Wisener plays the willowy Ruth Carr, Terri’s wife who supports his madcap schemes at first with her salary and security before cutting her ties and setting him free. Wisener’s second act ballad To Know Him Is To Love Him is beautiful for its poignancy (and neatly mirrors Darren Franklin/Dave Hyndman’s earlier rendition of Can’t You Understand) while her depiction of Ruth’s fraying patience adds emotional charge and grounds Good Vibrations as a deeply human story rather than one just about music.

Marty Maguire and Christina Nelson play Terri’s parents and add a lot of mirth in the many other roles they take on during the show. Playing an RUC officer more concerned with the possibility of catching petty misdemeanours than stopping intimidation on the streets, Maguire is on the receiving end of perhaps the best Hooley zinger of the show: “Excuse me officer, I’d like to report a civil war outside”.

Hats off to Odhrán McNulty, Chris Mohan, Jolene O’Hara, Gavin Peden and Dylan Reid who sing, strum and play their way through an album’s worth of music from Hank Williams’ I Saw The Light to Rudi’s Big Time, The Undertones’ Teenage Kicks (which punches out into the interval) and Stiff Little Fingers’ Alternative Ulster. And special mention to Connor Burnside whose drumming is energetic and powers up Katie Richardson’s arrangements and original music.

While Jack Knowles’ lighting design is muted, with a preference for back- and side-lighting characters’ faces, it leaves room for Jennifer Rooney’s choreography to light up the performers as she channels them in paths across the stage, creating frenzied moments of crowded ensemble, clean lines for some of the bands, and tiny details like how a guitar can be passed from one performer to another in an almost dancelike motion.

The penultimate scene strips away the musicians and the coattail clutchers. Terri stands alone with his life and legacy. Then a simple change of coat allows the story to time travel, a few seconds of magical theatre before the final encore.

I caught an early preview of the 2018 run of Good Vibrations, a Sunday afternoon matinee, on a quick trip home before, hours later, flying back to Skopje and the mayhem of the Macedonian referendum. While wowed by the ambition and the performances, I’d neither time to read up about the show beforehand now process the show afterwards, and didn’t write up a review. There’s been a bit more space to this year to connect the dots of the network of people and collectives that are referenced in Good Vibrations and continue to work today. I first got to know Marilyn and Dave Hyndman at Northern Visions (the NvTv community television channel) back in 2008/9 when they filmed a pilot episode of a chat show hosted by Donal Lyons and featuring local NI bloggers talking about blog posts. Amazingly, this Gogglebox for the blogosphere ran for eight episodes under the Ronseal title of Blogtalk … shamefully, when I look back, with an entirely male cast. It was only at Marilyn’s funeral last year that I heard more about the couple’s wider contribution to Belfast in the years before the television station, and it was moving tonight to see a version of them played by Cat Barter and Darren Franklin, depicting the couple whose anarchist bookstore Just Books and printing press shared a building with Terri’s first record shop.

There’s plenty more that could be said about punk and its counter-cultural dissonant relationship with the status quo of the day. Good Vibrations doesn’t have to be the last word on the topic, nor can it possibly present an encyclopaedic or comprehensive history. Instead what director Des Kennedy does so well is to celebrate the life and ethos of people who had space in their hearts for alternative ways of being. (A bit like the work and campaigning of Drs Paddy and Mary Randals in Navan who are featured in Sinéad O’Shea’s recent film Pray For Our Sinners.) Not quiet resistance, but right up in people’s faces.

Well worth catching a performance of Good Vibrations on stage at the Grand Opera House before Saturday 20 May, after which this Lyric Theatre production will take flight to New York’s Irish Arts Center from 14 June.

Photo credits: Carrie Davenport

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