SOUTH Shields playwright Ed Waugh’s third play featuring long-dead and almost forgotten working class North-East heroes looks like being his best. After Hadaway Harry “Clasper” the rower and Music Hall star Ned Corvan comes Joe Wilson, one of the first singer songwriters of entertainment.

150 years after the Tynesider packed out theatres across the North, including Darlington, the town’s Hippodrome gives a fitting world premiere where modern day musicians gather for the annual Joe Wilson Night and cleverly flashes back to the 1870s. Inspired by Dave Harker’s Gallowgate Lad book, Waugh’s gift for comedy-drama introduces us to an artist who grasped the core values of his times and created 360 songs before dying of TB in 1875. Wilson was 33.

Russell Floyd returns as director and after a slightly slow start sweeps us into a crisp and exhilarating tale of musicians re-discovering the wonders of Wilson. Setting the lyrics about love, domestic strife and industrial disputes of this “Bard of Tyneside” to contemporary tunes by Pete Scott and Alex Glasgow is one thing. Finding a charismatic cast to deliver the results is another.

Mick Cochrane plays Wilson in a way that would make the bard beam down from music hall heaven. Sarah Boulter as Isabella Wilson adds in solos and duets with Cochrane which led Waugh to trim his script to make the most of 20 of Wilson’s original songs.

Jamie Brown (as Joe’s twin brother Tom) and musician Jordan Miller complete a quartet exuding the essential confidence and panache of Geordie greats.

Viv Hardwick

• The Great Joe Wilson opens at the Hippodrome tonight and has two shows on Saturday.
• It is then at Whitley Bay Playhouse on Tuesday; Sage Gateshead on Wednesday; Alun Armstrong Theatre Stanley on Thursday, and the Westovian Theatre, South Shields, next Friday and Saturday.