Review: Kes at Bolton Octagon

A feral Billy Casper doing blue-tit like acrobatics on a cross bar during a school football match.

Sadistic PE teacher, Mr Sugden, played by a red-faced and barking mad Brian Glover, who imagines he is Bobby Charlton and cheats. The brutality of the cold shower he makes Billy take.

And the bird, hovering on the wind above fields on the edge of a South Yorkshire pit village. Kes, the 1969 adaptation of Barry Hines novel, A Kestrel for a Knave, by Tony Garnett and Ken Loach is one of the greatest British films ever made, and the scenes have stayed with me for decades.

Read more :

"A warm bubble bath of nostalgia" - Dreamboats and Petticoats at Palace Theatre reviewed

It evoked beautifully how the hawk awakens the possibility in the 15-year-old stray that his world may contain more than a path to the toil and darkness of working in a mine. So, how can this be transferred to the stage with just three actors?

A Bolton Octagon production succeeds in retaining both the harsh power and intermittent, soaring, joy of the novel and film, and the accents are Barnsley-authentic. Jake Dunn plays an angry, abused, neglected Billy, with wide-eyed fear and wonder as it dawns on him that the kestrel is proof that there is an escape from "dirty grey people with a dirty grey life".

A stark stage - just ladders and an old radio, from which we assume seeps the faint sounds of 1960s music, including the voice of Dusty Springfield, is perfect for reflecting the bleakness of Billy's domestic life. Dunn injects, impressively, both energy and fragility in equal measure to his part.

Bolton-born Harry Egan, plays "The Man", and the former Canon Slade Secondary School pupil is a tour-de-force.

He veers from manic to tender playing Billy's