Good People is set in Boston and sets up that awkward interface between local lad made good returning to his roots, and to those who didn't make it out of the hole. Imelda Staunton played the middle-aged mother of a mentally handicapped daughter who never made it. We find her being sacked from her job at the check-out at the local convenience store for being persistently late (due to said daughter). Maggie is bargaining for lower pay if she can just be kept on, convinced that she is being undercut by some Chinese girl. The play doesn't flinch from that element of working class racism that liberals would rather not face.
But she hears from one of her bingo buddies that her old boyfriend from high school who had made it good was back in town. Now a successful doctor, she was desperate enough to see if he could give her a job doing something. Anything.
What made this play so good in my opinion was its failure to be predictable. It changes direction unexpectedly a number of times. If you want to see it, maybe stop reading now.
The first act ends with her being invited, maybe reluctantly, to his young daughter's birthday party to see his big house on Chestnut Hill. And then she receives a call to say that his daughter is sick and so his wife wanted to call it off. Clearly this is just a way of uninviting her. But she decides she is going to go anyway.
So we are left at the interval anticipating the inevitable uncomfortable confrontation of an unwanted working class woman turning up at a party full of middle-class types. Except that when she gets there she finds his daughter really was sick, and the party really had been called off. Nevertheless his wife insists she stays, and the conversation takes other unexpected turns. An anecdote about a fight back in his school days comes up, but not a bit of rough and tumble in a tough neighbourhood, but the vicious beating of one black boy who couldn't run away. And then eventually Maggie plays the blackmail card that she wasn't going to use - her disabled daughter is his, and she hadn't told him to let him escape this place and go to college. She was a good person.
But then twist again. The professional couple are clearly having matrimonial difficulties so this would be the coup de grace. Except surprisingly the wife doesn't believe her story. And Maggie backs down and admits its not true.
Only for us to find at the bingo afterwards, that it was true.
The drama works well. But the real theme is that some people get the chance to escape and take it. Good for them. But some people just don't have the breaks. And that of course is true. Many people are in a bad place through there own folly. But ultimately someone is always going to be close to the bottom of the pile. If you aren't that clever, you ain't never going to become no fancy doctor. Someone will be working those check-outs on minimum wage.
The other great attraction of this play is the subtlety with which the characters are drawn. This isn't a JB Priestley play where all is black and white and one is bashed over the head until it is evident who are the good people and who are not. Here the working class characters are not universally wonderful in face of all adversity. And that just makes it all the more appealing. Good people are hard to find. But there may be some goodness in a lot of folk.
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