Just For One Day, Old Vic Theatre review ★★★★★

Where were you on Saturday 13 July, 1985? If you were around back then, chances are you’ll be able to answer this question, because it was the day Bob Geldof and Midge Ure’s Live Aid concerts – simultaneously performed in London and Philadelphia, and ambitiously broadcast to over a billion – made the world pause for the famine in Ethiopia. It’s this fond moment in history that Mrs. Doubtfire the musical writer John O’Farrell and & Juliet director Luke Sheppard have turned into a foot-stamping, air-punching jukebox musical. If it's a bit ‘dads’ disco’, it's also a reminder of the unparalleled feat these boomer pop-rockers pulled off in the name of charity.

The first half is largely taken up with a stubborn Bob Geldof (Craige Els) rallying his fellow industry big shots to join him in recording the now famous 1984 Band Aid single 'Do They Know It’s Christmas?', and demanding the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher (Julie Atherton in a misguidedly written role) let them donate the VAT money too. The second follows Geldof’s struggle to liaise with a prissy BBC and various other stakeholders over mounting the technologically ambitious concert with just 38 days’ notice.


Craige Els (Bob) and the Company in Just For One Day at The Old Vic

It’s a story too male and white not to raise some eyebrows by today’s standards. So enter Jemma (Naomi Katiyo), a fictional Gen Zer for whom the 1980s is ancient history studied in school, and whose narrative function is to call out the elephants in the room, including the lack of diversity on the concert's revered line-up and the Christmas single’s crass lyrics.

Other characters have been added in too: through Amara (Abiona Omonua), a charity worker on the ground in Ethiopia, the horrors of the famine and the corrupt military dictatorship that prevented aid getting into the country are explored. Through a sweet romantic plotline involving two young record store workers, Suzanne (Hope Kenna) and Tim (Joe Edgar), we see just how seismic Live Aid was – a fact reinforced through cameos from the concert’s pint pullers, nurses and minor support acts too.


Naomi Katiyo (Jemma) and the Company in Just For One Day at The Old Vic

Sheppard has avoided attempts to cast on visual likeness and instead employs a cast far more diverse than the names in the story they’re telling, even if costume designer Fay Fullerton has put most of them in mullets.

Soutra Gilmour’s set looks like a festival stage for the most part with the help of Andrzej Goulding’s videography. From it, verses of the songs performed that day along with other anthems from the era ring out. But this jukebox keeps skipping, and so we quickly roll from ‘Heroes’ into ‘Rockin’ All Over The World’, for example, or ‘In The Air Tonight’ into ‘We Will Rock You’. There’s one original song too: a cringeworthy rap saved for Geldof’s standoff with Thatcher. Credit to Gareth Owen’s sound design though, for making the experience sound akin to being at a festival.

If this energetic musical is not the hot ticket the concert once was, it’s a reminder of the Live Aid legacy and what a global coming together can achieve in the name of humanity.