Blackpool Tower Ballroom here they come: Chloe McDonald’s Nat, left, Martha Godber’s Sally and Emilio Encinoso-Gil’s Kyle keep the faith in John Godber’s hymn to Northern Soul, Do I Love You?
JOHN Godber has a new play on its way this autumn: Black Tie Ball, a tale of hotel upstairs and downstairs, bow ties and fake tans, jealousies and avarice, divorces and affairs, told by staff at breakneck speed from arrival at seven to carriages at midnight. Harrogate Theatre, from September 10 to 13, and Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, from November 12 to 15, await.
There is a Godber house style, billed as his “signature visceral style”, one that applies as much to his hymn to Northern Soul, Do I Love You?, as it will to Black Tie Ball. Ever since Bouncers and Teechers, less has been more in Godber plays: compact casts, concise scenes, minimal props and space aplenty for combative or compatible movement.
No-nonsense Yorkshireman Godber has been writing plays since 1977, the year of punk at its scratchy apex, and likewise he tore up the rule book to write working-class dramas, economical but full of home truths, albeit with a nod to Bertolt Brecht in breaking down theatre’s fourth wall to favour direct address.
Do I Love You? is up there with his best works, visiting York Theatre Royal in the concluding week of its third tour since its 2023 debut, still with the same fresh-faced cast of Martha Godber, Chloe McDonald and Emilio Encinoso-Gil, who are in the groove not only of the sublime underground Sixties and Seventies music, but also of working together regularly, like the comic interplay of a well-oiled TV comedy series.
Frank exchange: Martha Godber’s Sally makes her point to Chloe McDonald’s Nat as Emilio Encinoso-Gil’s Kyle seeks to intervene in Do I Love You?
Godber is always at his best when his fractious comedies are fired by both love and anger, ideally backed by a pulsating soundtrack too. The love here is for Northern Soul from his own days of going to all-nighters and weekenders across the north, and he writes with passion, Record Collector levels of knowledge, not so much nostalgia, but more a lament for what we have lost.
Qualities of authenticity, truth, pride: all values he attributes to Northern Soul, music of pain and sorrow and ecstatic release; music of and for the working classes.
He places his drama in the hands of what he calls the lost generation, the twenty-something post-Covid generation stuck in the sludge of working at drive-through fried chicken counters.
Meet Martha Godber’s Sally, who looks after her ailing Irish-born grandma (played with a scarf, a fag and a hacking cough by McDonald), neglected by her drunkard mother. Meet Encinoso-Gil’s Kyle, her best mate, from Spanish stock, but the timing has never been right for it to be anything more than that. Meet McDonald’s Nat (or ‘Natalie’, she insists), their friend since schooldays, who has a crush on Kyle too and likes a spliff or two.
The anger lies in Godber surveying how little has changed between Britain in 1973 and 2023, the year in which the play is still set with Rishi Sunak as Prime Minister, “looking 11 years old” as he puts it.
Do I Love You? writer-director John Godber: Keeping the faith in Northern Soul when losing the faith in everything else
Godber writes of rising costs and prices, unemployment and small-town blues; of pubs closing, hospitality venues going; strikes on-going. Plus ca change.
He writes too of the everyday difficulties of young lives, as they fall out with each other, while facing mounting problems at home. What is left but to find a love, something to believe in, to keep the faith?
Godber interweaves the trio’s trials and tribulations with their initiation into Northern Soul, brilliantly described in Sally’s account of their first visit to a Cleethorpes all-nighter: £3 for eight hours. Soul devotees on the dancefloor, sliding, gliding, kicking, making her cry, although she doesn’t know why, but the way Godber writes, we do.
He takes us there with a sense of poetic wonder, just as he captures the tedium of taking fried chicken orders by reducing the experience to the fewest words possible for the maximum comical impact.
Emilio Encinoso-Gil’s Kyle tentatively shows off his dancefloor moves in Do I Love You?, to the scornful amusement of Chloe McDonald’s Nat and Martha Godber’s Sally
The songs can be played only in snippets that have to stop all too quickly, but Godber evokes Northern Soul by mentioning all the landmark songs and locations and by the power of his pen.
Best of all is the fulminating speech by Encinoso-Gil’s hunched-up Keith, a soul veteran with a criminal past and fingers in every pie, who is Do I Love You’s version of Lucky Eric in Bouncers, except that he squeezes all he has to say into one impassioned yet beautiful rant-cum-lament, whereas Eric has four bites at the sour cherry.
All three performances are terrific, Martha Godber especially so, and if no moment that follows Keith’s speech quite matches it, Do I Love You? packs an emotional punch, full of northern wit, grit and soul power hits.
John Godber Company in Do I Love You?, York Theatre Royal, until Saturday, 7.30pm plus 2pm matinee tomorrow (12/6/2025) and 2.30pm, Saturday. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.