The Battle review – Britpop bickering and 90s nostalgia in Blur v Oasis comedy

The bands that came to symbolise a divided nation compete to top the charts in John Niven’s jokey play but it is woefully short on drama

Apparently, they did a lot of sitting about in 1995. They lounged in Alexandra Palace for the Brit awards when Damon Albarn was magnanimous in victory. They propped up the tables in the members’ area where Blur crashed an Oasis party to celebrate Some Might Say getting to No 1. They had deckchairs for Liam Gallagher to be interviewed, bar stools for hard-drinking pop stars to fall off, and fancy couches for Albarn and Justine Frischmann to splash their cash on. There might have been more, but a big chunk of Fly Davis’s set was obscured from my side of the theatre.

So many chairs but so little drama. John Niven’s play alights on pop’s last great moment of cultural tension. Releasing singles in the same week, Oasis and Blur went into the ring, one representing the working-class north, the other the bourgeois south. Together, they were the flag-wavers of Britpop. In opposition, they symbolised a divided nation. The song that got to No 1 – Oasis’s Roll With It or Blur’s Country House – would define the country’s mood.

These ideas are covered by Niven’s jokey script, but the novelist turned playwright gives us quarrelling in place of drama, pop stars sitting down where you need them up on their feet. A bookish Graham Coxon (Will Taylor) grumbles about an egotistical Albarn (Oscar Lloyd); a manspreading Liam (George Usher) squabbles with a grimacing Noel (Paddy Stafford); one band bickers about the other.

The Battle takes us from the studio where Oasis recorded Roll With It to the interview when Noel Gallagher told the Observer’s Miranda Sawyer that he wished the singer and bass player of Blur would “catch Aids and die”. While Oasis focus on cigarettes and alcohol, the members of Blur argue about the sexual politics behind the video for Country House.

The show feeds the audience’s appetite for nostalgia with its roll call of period references – Shed Seven, Chris Evans, Keith Allen – and the Beavis and Butt-Head-style cartoons that cover the ponderous scene changes. But Matthew Dunster’s production is resolutely chair-bound, until, that is, a Tarantino-esque finale, as jarring as it is silly, creates the illusion of dramatic momentum.

• At Birmingham Rep until 7 March. Then at Manchester Opera House, 17-21 March