Royal Exchange, Manchester
Josh Seymour’s production of the 90s musical about Viv Nicholson’s big win, and how she spent it, leaves you feeling a bit short-changed

Just like that, £152,000 goes up in (real) flames. Left unanswered, after this symbolic opening to the 1998 musical by Steve Brown and Justin Greene about 1961 football pools winner Viv Nicholson, is how someone could burn through today’s equivalent of more than £4m in less than five years.

The story is narrated retrospectively by Viv (Rachel Leskovac), who watches her younger self, played by Rose Galbraith, scurry and flutter across the stage like a banknote in a breeze. That stage is a silver coin on cash-green carpet, over which tinsel fringes hang like confetti that never lands. The lustre of Grace Smart’s design suggests an illusory quality to Viv’s compulsive romanticism. Described as a “dream girl”, she views sex, for instance, not as “friggin’” but as “a beautiful memory… a dance of love”. Strings of dancers parade through, with Lucy Hind choreographing Charlestons and foxtrots that reinforce Viv’s surreal fantasy.

Josh Seymour’s production is an appropriately gaudy fever dream, with blizzards of cash and Galbraith riding a champagne bottle like a rocket. Frivolity dominates; this play scrimps on pathos. Viv’s abusive father (a hammy Joe Alessi) and a series of violent husbands are treated clumsily, hands held aloft in freeze frame after striking her. The hardship of Viv’s mining community is kept to a single song, John Collier, which builds to a rousing chorus, the men’s voices resonating like heavy machinery.

It amounts to a scant inquiry into the motivations behind the impulsivity that finds Viv pregnant at 16, married at 17, with four more husbands to come, and the spending sprees themselves. Leskovac contemplates all this, emotionally spent, letting out the words “Roll back the years” like a long sigh. She delivers the ballad Who’s Gonna Love Me?, lit harshly on the now bare stage, as if howling in an empty vault.

At other times Viv is impassive, lacking ruefulness. At the end, Spend Spend Spend can muster only platitude (money isn’t everything). Not quite the jackpot, then.

Spend Spend Spend is at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, until 11 January 2025