Tom Wright's new play Please Please Me at the Kiln Theatre offers a fresh perspective on the Beatles' manager Brian Epstein, focusing on how the band shaped his tragically short life rather than the other way around. The play delves into Epstein's rumoured affair with John Lennon, which came to define the life of a Jewish gay man who always felt an outsider despite his success.
The production opens with a young Epstein in his father's record shop, replacing Bruch's violin concerto with Elvis's Hound Dog. While his father supports his instincts in the baffling world of 1960s pop, the play makes clear that Epstein's homosexuality was a source of shame and danger. Tom Piper's set of spinning closets tumbles him down menacing corridors, reinforcing a life concealed and buried.
Smitten with the Beatles, Epstein offers his services with naivety, integrity and nous. But as his plans prosper, he loses himself in the orbit of Lennon's volatile genius. The question of what happened during a holiday in Torremolinos, just as the Beatles were about to break big, has long been speculated upon. Lennon angrily denied rumours of an affair at the time but later seemed to confirm it.
In Amit Sharma's production, the Torremolinos scene becomes the linchpin that hurtles Epstein into desperation and drug dependence. Calam Lynch gives a terrific, increasingly physical performance in the central role, while Eleanor Worthington-Cox brings distinction to multiple roles, including John's aunt Mimi and wife Cynthia, and Epstein's client Cilla Black. Noah Ritter makes a fine stage debut as Lennon, combining chaotic charisma with hints of cruelty.
As Beatlemania grips the globe, Lennon 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.
