Please Please Me at Kiln Theatre

Brian Epstein was the Fab Four’s forgotten fifth, the manager who took The Beatles from Liverpudlian basements to the world stage. He was also a gay man in a time when homosexuality was not just socially unacceptable but illegal. His story is ripe for dramatisation, and it’s brought to the stage at the Kiln Theatre by playwright Tom Wright and director Amit Sharma. Though Please Please Me is a good profile of the man’s personal struggles, with a strong lead performance, it’s held back by the familiar beats of Beatles history and some melodramatic dialogue.

The play whizzes through Brian’s humble start at his father’s shop (and his father’s dismay at discovering his homosexuality) to see him ambitiously take on The Beatles as his first ever managerial gig. Picking up fellow Merseyside star Cilla Black along the way, he’s quickly scoring record deals and heading on tour with “the boys” – all the while battling the challenges of being gay in the 1960s. When the pressure (both personal and professional) becomes consuming, the still-young Brian finds himself on a perilous downward spiral.

Please Please Me is at its best when it explores the tragedy of navigating life and romance as a gay man in a world that responds to queerness with disgust and violence. “Rent boys” steal Brian’s money and leave him with black eyes, but he persists because of that simple human need to be loved and desired. From violent submissive sex to various addictions, Brian copes in self-destructive ways, and Wright explores this dark path with interest, empathy, and just the right dollop of humour.

Brian’s tragic descent heads into freefall in the second act, charted by a capable and considered lead performance from Calam Lynch. His mannerisms are all prim and proper and contained in act one, and then fluid and expressive in act two.

While Brian’s personal arc is interestingly drawn, the parallel story of The Beatles’ rise feels overfamiliar. Their history has been exhaustively studied and pulled apart already, and the travails of the manager – like outfitting the band in suits instead of leather, or a merchandising deal gone wrong – aren’t really the most interesting part of it.

There is one twist on Beatles lore, based on denied but long-standing rumours about Brian’s relationship with John Lennon. Though it largely works within the story, it’s sometimes overplayed and, in those instances, strays close to the territory of fan fiction (the final scene in particular feels a stretch). Please Please Me has some overly soapy moments, with parts of the dialogue overladen with dramatic meaning at the expense of sounding natural. Some particularly angsty lines feel ripped from a YA novel, like “Can I be saved?” Or “Are you doing this because you love me, or because you hate yourself?”

It’s these elements that render Please Please Me an enjoyable but fairly standard music biopic, instead of the truly great character drama hinted at in the more nuanced, thought-provoking scenes about Brian’s inner torment.