Although the volume of posts on my blog is essentially fueled by my neurotic desire to keep on top of the various emails that flood my inboxes, I am genuinely enthusiastic about every single theatrical event that happens - at least until I attend some of them, when my more expected tastes resurface and I complain that Cats lacks a meaningful engagement with community issues.
But something like The Full Monty is a tough one to preview: my instincts tell me that a play based on a film based on unemployed steelworkers might just about fit in with my belief that politically engaged theatre is vital, but its production is more likely based on the success of the movie than any dedication to its ironic personal politics of the masculine.
The plot is well known: six men, no jobs, one chance for financial redemption, through the act of striptease. Although the film was made in 1997, making its book office success part of the brief, optimistic period when New Labour supplanted the Tories, its story is firmly rooted in the anguish caused by the Thatcherite restructuring of society, when traditional industry was closed down and the unions fought a rearguard battle to defend jobs.
It has more than a tangental connection to Brassed Off, another film set in an area devastated by the closure of hard industry that sees the unemployed men find joy through art. And beneath the titillation provided by six men getting their kit off, there is the harsh reality of a country in which work is getting scarce.
That alone is enough to justify a remounting. That the men find their happy ending by stripping in public adds a nice touch of masculine panic: once they were defined by working steel, now they are appreciated for getting wood.
However, it belongs in a box that gives me cause to pause: populist theatre. It isn't that I instinctively distrust work because it is popular: I worry that it is popular because it doesn't challenge assumptions, or delve into ideas beyond presenting them on a nice, simple surface.
Political theatre is difficult - it is bound to annoy some people, and balancing entertainment with polemic is beyond most artists (the 1970s has plenty of plays that won't be revived anytime soon, thanks to their analysis of minority left wing groups that have long since disappeared).
The Full Monty might manage it - the author Simon Beaufoy, who more recently won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar in 2009 for Slumdog Millionaire, is no slouch.
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