Brick Up The Mersey Tunnels

Published Wednesday 18 July 2007 at 14:50 by Chris High

Following a highly successful three week run in 2006, Liverpool’s own Brick Up The Mersey Tunnels is still packing in audiences that many of the so-called “big productions” would die for.

Why? Because it’s damn funny and brilliantly performed.

Fed up with how the so called “posh” people of Merseyside - those from the Wirral - are continuously putting down Scousers, Dickie Lewis (Andrew Schofield), Nick Walton (Carl Chase) and Gerard Gardner (Davy Edge) form The Kingsway Three and, simply, brick up the major traffic arteries that join the peninsula to the metropolis.

This, of course, means the self-righteous, over-bearing, stuck up Anne Twacky (Eithne Browne) - a Liverpool born, bred and desperate-to-forget-it JP now living in suburbia - can’t get to work in a city she despises, but is nonetheless happy to work in.

Dave Kirby and Nicky Alt’s script is something special, delivered by an astonishingly talented cast. Schofield, the name-dropping conservatory builder, Dickie Lewis, is superb. Roy Brandon’s hen-pecked, line dancing Dennis Twacky, is utterly hilarious and Chase’s narrator and eventual rebel, Nick Walton, is wonderful. While the gorgeous Suzanne Collins, playing cafe-owning dreamer, Maggie, delivered one of the night’s many highlights by singing Somewhere Over The Mersey, it was the delightful Browne who stole the show and made it her own.

Who is ever likely to forget the Blue Ridge Mountains Of Virginia being turned into The Blue Rinse Mansions of the Wirral?

Shakespeare it might not be but, honestly, who cares? This is still a superb night out.