JOHN Godber’s 1977 play Bouncers was once voted the nation’s most popular play, and has been performed at the National Theatre, toured the world and been staged by countless amateur companies in its almost 50-year long life.

The current production at Sherborne’s Studio Theatre, directed by Sarah Webster, is my first
encounter with this story of a night on the town (probably Leeds) in the 1980s. Four men are arriving for work outside Mr Cinders nightclub, on a weekend night that the punters have been planning for days.

There is Lucky Eric (so called as he always seems to find the cash dropped on the sticky, sodden floor), Judd, Ralph and the youngster, Les. Over the months and years they have bounced at the club, a routine has evolved. Their terse greetings are followed by regular comments on their customers, their responses and their expectations of the hours ahead. They are four bluff Northern blokes, locked in a camararderie that ignores their “other lives”.

Godber’s brilliant dialogue captures vivid pictures of the twilight lives of the nightclub customers, from the idiotic posh boys to the already-drunken girls, the lads on the lash looking to get laid and the leftovers looking for love as closing time looms.

With its soundtrack of old favourites throbbing in the background, Gary Brooks, Jordon Wiseman, Freddie Wopat and his son Harry take on a huge range of characters, each keenly delineated and all-too-recognisable. From their main roles as the men in DJs and bow ties – Gary Brooks as Judd, Jordan Wiseman as Ralph, Freddie Wopat as Lucky Eric (the thoughtful one) and Harry Wopat as Les, the quartet moves through all the characters of the evening, interspersed with returns to their bouncer personae, and they do it brilliantly.

Bouncers is billed as a play of the 1980s, to be viewed through the mist of nostalgia, but the main impression is of how little we learn and how little we change. It is often hilariously funny, often very sad, swathed in loneliness, boredom and tedium … and always very real. It’s a tour de force of acting from four brash, sensitive, selfish, caring, hopeful, human beings, directed with a precise eye in a corrugated iron former chapel in Sherborne. And well worth the ticket price.

GP-W