Counter Culture

Introduction

The reopening of the Epstein Theatre in September, following a two-year hiatus due to funding issues, is a cause for celebration. It’s a great little theatre, run by great people, and I hope its launch will prove to be a success.

The size of the audience on this night, with the theatre all but full, suggests it will be.

It was good to be back in one of my favourite places in Liverpool and, as a big Beatles buff, for my own return to be at the opening night and World Premier of a play based on the Beatles’ formative Hamburg period, 1960-62, was a bonus.

The play was written by Ian Salmon, who also wrote Girls Don’t Play Guitars, the story of Merseybeat all-girl group The Liverbirds. That was also promising, as I’d enjoyed that, as can be seen from my review from earlier this year Experience ‘Girls Don’t Play Guitars’ at Liverpool Royal Court | Counter Culture

As with his earlier work, the format of the play was of music performed live by local actor-musicians, interspersed with dramatised scenes, linked together by a narrative delivered by one of the central characters.

The decision to use former Beatles manager Allan Williams, played here by the excellent Ian Schofield, was a good one. Williams was an engaging local character who was never short of a witty line or anecdote or two, as can be seen in many YouTube interviews and clips.

He set the tone early, by introducing himself as ‘The man who will forever be known as The Man Who Gave Away the Beatles, which is my own fault, because that’s what I called my book’ (a very good book, which is sadly hard to find nowadays, unless you’re prepared to take out a bank loan).

Positives

That’s the first positive, excellent narration by Schofield in the voice of Williams, some fine dialogue, and the story of the period delivered more than adequately. At least, for non-Beatles buffs. Not quite so much for obsessives like me, who’ve read all the books and enjoy little more than picking up on inaccuracies. I’ll return to that later.

The music was also excellent. It can’t be east to find six young local lads who can not only act, but resemble the boys themselves (I’m counting Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best as Beatles here, because they were, in Stu’s case for a part of the period covered and in Pete’s for almost all of it) enough to at least get away with it, and who also have the musical and vocal chops to deliver excellent versions of the rock ‘n’ roll and standards covers that made up the vast majority of the band’s set at this time. But this was a task that the production team was able to deliver on.

The sparse set, a musical stage set up with suitably vintage instruments and microphones, with a small table and four chairs up centre, where non-musical scenes could be played out, worked well, as it had in Salmon’s earlier work.

Aside from Schofield, and bearing in mind that most of the cast took on multiple roles at different parts of the play, the standout performance, for me, came from Connor Simpkins as Sutcliffe.

Stu’, the talented painter and reluctant bassist who died of a brain haemorrhage aged only twenty-one in April 1962, has always fascinated me. I’ve visited his humble grave in Huyton, and even once started a Beatles Alternative History novel called Sutcliffe Remembers, based on the premise that he lived to a ripe old age, a project I hope to revisit.

It was through Stu’ that the two emotional high-points of the evening were delivered.

The first of these was when he serenaded new girlfriend, Astrid Kirchherr, with Love Me Tender.

Astrid was one of the three ‘Exis’ (short for Existentialists) along with Klaus Voorman and Jurgen Vollmer, who did so much to spread the Beatles’ appeal in Hamburg beyond that of drunken sailors and ‘women of the night’ towards a more art-school type crowd. It was Astrid who took the first iconic photographs of the Beatles, and eventually provided them with their iconic ‘Mop-Top’ hairstyle.

Love Me Tender was indeed the only Sutcliffe lead vocal (that we’re aware of) included in the band’s set. Sadly, no recording of this exists, despite his sister’s attempt to pass off a string-laden version that can still be found online as genuine. Her credibility was not exactly helped when, at the height of Britpop, she ‘discovered’ a cache of ‘lost’ Lennon-Sutcliffe lyrics which she attempted to sell to Noel Gallagher…

But the rendition here sounded much as I would have expected it to sound, and to see it sung as the two gazed lovingly into one another’s eyes, with the knowledge of the fate that awaited him, was genuinely touching.

Emotional punch number two was the moment, as the band returned once more to Hamburg, came when Astrid broke it to John (played by Michael Hawkins) that Stu’, arguably the first of three Lennon artistic soul mates, Stu, Paul and Yoko, was dead.

Arguably, dramatic power might have been added by seeing John’s reportedly hysterical reaction, which was so extreme that those present didn’t know whether he was laughing or crying, enacted on stage. But hearing Astrid’s words, a postscript from Williams and then a final song before the interval dedicated by John to his ‘best friend’ was powerful enough.

It was nice to see some rather neglected figures in early Beatles lore portrayed. This was especially true of Williams’ first wife, Chinese Beryl (‘Chinese’ because his second wife was also called Beryl – Allan seemed to have very niche requirements when it came to his spouses), because she did indeed play an important role in securing the Beatles work at this time, and was probably the level-headed sidekick that Scouse Del-Boy Williams required.

Beryl was well depicted by Jess Smith.

It would have been nice to see Mona Best, Pete’s mum, similarly portrayed, as she too was an important figure in this period. But so were a lot of people, and you can’t have everything.

Overall, both in terms of music and acting/dialogue, the play is a solid, enjoyable ensemble piece.

Negatives

I should preface this section by acknowledging that I’m not really the ideal audience for a show like this. If you’re a casual Beatles fan, and/or a fifties rock ‘n’ roll aficionado, then the likelihood is that you will leave the theatre happy and appreciative, and with substantially more knowledge about the Beatles in Hamburg than you did previously.

But we Beatles buffs are a pedantic bunch, and a lack of attention to detail can have a disproportionately negative effect on our enjoyment of any portrayal of the band.

I could cite numerous examples from the otherwise decent early Beatles movies Backbeat and Nowhere Boy, but I won’t, other than to say that they were good films which would have been better if they’d stuck to the facts as known at the time they were made.

For this play, local early Beatles historian David Bedford (not that one) acted as ‘Beatles historical advisor’, and, to his credit, out-and-out glaring errors were rare, though I’ll mention a couple that somehow slipped through shortly.

But my main problem with the play was that the story at the centre of the Hamburg period was lost, I suspect not through a lack of knowledge, but a lack of nerve, of a willingness to take chances.

The real story in a nutshell is that the Beatles were just one of many mediocre Liverpool bands who’d transitioned from skiffle to rock ‘n’ roll at the time of their first series of Hamburg engagements in August 1960. The anecdote that the leader of Derry and the Seniors, the first of the Merseybeat groups to make the trip, objected to the Beatles being sent out because they were ‘The worst band in Liverpool’ , and as such risked ruining the scene for everyone else, is well-worn, but almost certainly true.

But, through performing six to eight hours per night, night after night, for weeks on end, fuelled by booze and ‘Prellies’ (Preludin, a readily available amphetamine pill in Germany at the time), and the constant demands to ‘Mach Schau’ (Make Show) they got better and better, broadening their stage repertoire and their stage presence, progressing through the clubs, from the depressing Indra, to the slightly better Kaiserkeller to the Top Ten, to, in their final visit in December 1962, the prestigious Star Club with each visit and, as has been mentioned, also broadening their appeal beyond the usual rowdy Reeperbahn crowd.

In the play, however, the music was just as good at the beginning as it was at the end. Thus, hearing the famous remark by Derry out of Derry and the Seniors being made after a blistering performance of Johnny B Goode or whatever was incongruous.

I can certainly see the thinking behind this. Would a theatre audience want to sit through some raw, stumbling, sub-standard versions of songs before they reached an acceptable level?

Maybe some wouldn’t. But, for the story to work, I needed to see the improvement, the transition from the ‘worst’ to the best band in Liverpool, and I think it could have been done without testing the patience of the audience too much.

The sound of the band was augmented by a girl playing an electric keyboard. I don’t have a problem with this, but having her visible stage left, playing a very late-twentieth/early-twenty-first-century instrument was an error. Surely, the intent had to be to give the impression that we really were watching the formative Beatles in action? Her presence somewhat shattered the illusion, making the necessary suspension of disbelief impossible.

The decision to have the cast play multiple roles was also problematic at times. The same actor, Nick Sheedy, transforming himself from Pete Best to Ringo Starr was fine. A quick ruffle of the hair and a deepening of the voice, and job done.

And Andrew Cowpothwaite was fine as Lord Woodbine early on. But as a black Jurgen Vollmer, the third Exi? No, sorry.

The actor who played Klaus was also good in that initial role, but I wasn’t at all convinced by his later reappearance as George Martin.

When it comes to historical inaccuracies, I only spotted two.

The first of these concerned the first time that John, Paul, George and Ringo played together on record. This did indeed happen in Hamburg in 1960, two years before Ringo became a Beatle proper. It’s also true that a drunk Williams left his only copy of this record in the back of a Liverpool taxi. Neither this copy nor any of the other five acetates allegedly produced has ever resurfaced and would be worth a fortune today. The song in question was the old standard Summertime, though some also cite Fever and September Song as having also been recorded.

But they weren’t acting as the backing band for Rory Storm, the leader of Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, the band Ringo was a member of at this time. They were backing the bass player out of that band, Lu Waters, who Williams thought he could possibly promote as a solo crooner.

The other error concerned the famous last chance ‘audition’ they did for George Martin at EMI.

Old George trotted out this anecdote for so long that there’s little doubt that he really remembered it as an ‘audition.’

But Mark Lewisohn’s epic Tune In, volume one of his planned three-volume Beatles biography, 1700 pages, and only up to January 1963, proved beyond doubt, with primary documentation, that it wasn’t an audition at all. The Beatles had already been signed, on the strength of the publishing rights to John and Paul’s original material.

I suppose, such things don’t matter much in the scheme of things, and I get poetic licence and all that, but I don’t see much value in continuing to recycle old tales once they’ve been shown to be inaccurate. Even if only a tiny percentage of the audience is able to spot such things, the appreciation of that tiny percentage adds a depth to a work which is otherwise lacking.

 Conclusion

As far as I’m aware, all Beatles films, plays etc have concentrated on the early days, when they were mostly a covers band, because of the notorious difficulty in getting the necessary permission to feature original Beatles material. So, it was a nice surprise when, as an encore, we were treated to a medley of Beatlemania period hits, I Want To Hold Your Hand/From Me To You/Please, Please Me/I Saw Her Standing There.

I’m not sure how the producers swung this, but I’m glad they did. The Beatles in their first flush of British fame, was a good place to end, and the performance looked and sounded authentic, and had most of the audience on its feet.

I still wish we’d seen something of the process of how they got from Point A to Point B in a mere thirty months, but, as I’ve said, I suppose I’m not really the target audience.

A good night out.

The play concludes its run at the Epstein on 11^th October, but will no doubt be appearing at a theatre near you soon.

Anthony C Green, October 2025