Made In Liverpool

Before there were four Beatles, there were five. South London, 1976. Millie Sutcliffe stands alone in a gallery of her late son’s paintings, in front of one large unfinished canvas, and prepares to answer the question people have asked her for fourteen years: what was Stuart Sutcliffe really like? The beautiful boy in the dark glasses. The Fifth Beatle. The boy John Lennon loved. It seems everyone has their own idea of who Stuart was. This world premiere tries to find the truth underneath all of that. We go back to a Liverpool bedroom, where a restless, magnetic John Lennon talks his closest friend into buying a bass guitar he barely knows how to play, just to keep a young band together. From there to Hamburg, where The Beatles find their sound and their nerve in the sweat of the Reeperbahn, photographed for the first time by a young German student, Astrid Kirchherr. As the band gets louder, Stuart is quietly pulled toward something else: his painting, his love for Astrid, a future his oldest friend can’t follow him into. He was dead at twenty one, before the world ever heard the band he helped name. This isn’t a Beatles tribute. It’s a play, with music, about friendship, ambition and the particular sadness of being remembered as someone else’s footnote. At its heart is a mother’s determination to reclaim her son from the legend that has swallowed him whole. Featuring John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison, glimpsed at the edges of a much more personal story. Directed by Martin Berry, in a world premiere that asks: when the world only remembers you for what you left behind, who gets to tell the story of who you really were? Access performances Audio-described performance: Sat 26 Jun, 2pm. Captioned performance: Sat 26 Jun, 7pm. BSL-interpreted performance: Thu 1 Jul, 7pm, provided by Complete Communication. Relaxed performance: Sat 3 Jul, 2pm. READ MORE ABOUT ACCESS PERFORMANCES AT OUR THEATRE Post-show discussion 1st July Join us for a post-show discussion following Exeter Northcott’s new production of Made in Liverpool. We will be covering all things Made in Liverpool as well as discussing the process of bringing Made in Liverpool to the stage. Audiences are encouraged to stay, ask questions and share thoughts in what promises to be a lively and engaging exploration of the play. The post show discussion will be BSL-interpreted.