The Sainsbury Singers begin their 2009 with a staging of Lionel Bart’s follow up to Oliver!, Blitz! – a tale of typical East End families during the Second World War.

The Montagues and Capulets of the show are a Jewish family, headed by an indomitable widowed matriarch, the Blitzsteins and the Lockes, a Cockney family.

Mr Locke runs a fruit and veg stall, while Mrs Blitzstein sells pickled herring on her barrow. They don’t get on and vocally express their animosity in song and dialogue, but, naturally enough, the next generation has fallen in love and there’s nothing much they can do about it.

Much of the play is filled with the concerns and attitudes of a stereotypical Jewish Mother – an archetype from everyone’s nightmares, surely.

Not only has her daughter fallen in love with a boy, but her son has deserted from the Army on the eve of his embarkation for North Africa, and there’s no one to eat the cake she’s baked for him – ach, the shame!

In this role Tricia Goodchild is very good indeed – singing strongly, conveying the depth of character and emotion well, and being both moving and very funny.

Her opposite half, Alfred Locke – an offensive misery of a man – is much less likable, but still well played by familiar Sainsbury Singers face Peter Cox.

He hangs around with a fellow First World War veteran, the tale telling Ernie Nearmiss, with whom he can swap bigotry and reminiscences in equal measure.

Although it’s impossible he’d remember an East End without immigrants, since to find that would be to travel so far back in history as to be almost mythical, they still find the company of so many un-English people disturbing and threatening – even though as he bawls out Mrs Blitzstein one can’t help but think what is happening – and has been going on systematically for the previous decade – 400 miles to the east.

Naturally dreadful things happen – people are wounded, houses are lost, lovers are parted – and naturally enough things come together in the end – this is, after all, more a comedy than a tragedy, and a wedding is followed by a reconciliation of sorts between the two antagonists.

Along the way there are plenty of songs – some of which are marred by the usual technical difficulties amateur groups always encounter in The Hexagon – inadequate attention to the amplification of singers – individual microphones being turned on after singers have begun, and singers with solo lines not being miked at all attempting to be heard at the same level as those who are. But most of the songs come across well and the band is particularly good – with a lovely brass and wind section which gave it that authentic big band sound of the time.

The sets were also very nice – a trio of movable brick towers that doubled as streets, houses, alleys, and provide a clear sense of moving from one location to another, simply and effectively.

The last thing to mention is Lionel Bart’s apparent fearlessness of working with children. There are a couple of scenes for the kids’ ensemble – one as they’re waiting on the station platform to be evacuated and another when they’ve come back to London and are playing playground games – which serve as light relief, giving a pause in the narrative and probably allowing costume changes and a quick cigarette backstage (not that there’s any smoking allowed backstage, of course).

And the kids are very good and well received (even after subtracting the obligatory ‘ahs’ and ‘oohs’ and ‘oh, how sweet’ that the simple appearance of little people on stage brings to an audience filled with their grandparents).

All round, not a bad production at all.