At the age of 30, the Beatles’s legendary manager, Brian Epstein, published his autobiography. At 32 he was dead, and his passing is widely considered the beginning of the end for the band. Tom Wright’s fascinating new play is less concerned with Epstein’s effect on a group of messy haired, leather-jacketed Liverpudlians than with their effect on him. In particular, it focuses on the relationship with John Lennon that would come to define the life of a Jewish gay man who, for all his success, always felt an outsider.
We first meet Brian as a young man in his father’s record shop, replacing Bruch’s violin concerto with Elvis’s Hound Dog. His dad is happy to encourage his instincts in the baffling new world of 1960s pop – “Which Richard is the little one?” he’s forced to ask – but as the play’s breakneck opening makes clear, his son’s homosexuality is a source of shame and danger. Tom Piper’s mobile set of spinning closets (the shop also sells furniture) tumbles him down menacing corridors and alleyways; a shadowy Cavern Club reinforces the sense of a life concealed and buried.
Smitten with what he sees there, Brian offers the band his services with a combination of naivety, integrity and nous – but even as his plans for them prosper, he’s losing himself in the orbit of Lennon’s volatile genius. The question of what happened between the two during a holiday in Torremolinos just as the Beatles were about to break big has long been speculated upon. At the time Lennon angrily denied rumours of an affair, even beating up a friend who joshed him about it, but later seemed to confirm it.
In Amit Sharma’s production it becomes the linchpin scene whose outcome hurtles Brian into increasing desperation and drug dependence. Calam Lynch gives a terrific, increasingly physical performance in the central role, while Eleanor Worthington-Cox brings distinction to a variety of roles, as John’s daunting Aunt Mimi and his wife Cynthia, and as Brian’s client and confidante Cilla Black
As for John, it’s no picnic to portray a man more popular than Jesus, but Noah Ritter combines chaotic charisma with hints of cruelty in a fine stage debut. As Beatlemania grips the globe, he bemoans how the band are “trapped by the very thing that set us free”. Epstein’s tragedy is that he may have never found freedom at all.