IT'S a long journey but an ultimately worthwhile one.
This production of Farnworth-born Jim Cartwright's play, which has been described as a Lancastrian Under Milk Wood, starts off lacking the glue that binds the characters and the story together - but then, that was the 1980s. The glue didn't stick.
The play, directed with some originality by Noreen Kershaw, tells the story of life on one road in a depressed northern town in Thatcher's Britain and effectively portrays, in case anyone had forgotten, the desolation wrought on the area during that period of trade union disputes, mass unemployment and strikes.
It reminds me of tatty nights spent on tatty settees in tatty houses on tatty streets that once meant so much to so many but probably no longer even exist.
John Henshaw - Ray the landlord of The Grapes in Early Doors - plays drunken guide Scullery, who haunts the road, highlighting the grim landscape and setting the scene for its inhabitants' lives.
The hopelessness and desperation of the characters is revealed in their slide through unemployment and into alcoholism and domestic violence. Like a Lancashire answer to Yorkshire's Rita, Sue and Bob Too, though I'm not sure which of those was the chicken and which was the egg.
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Still, there's always love and sex to get them through the days . . .
The glue - was it Blu-Tac back then? - comes in the second half, with a great comic moment involving Henshaw and a supermarket trolley, and fantastic scenes that leave naked the characters' desire for something, anything . . . a life with meaning.
Each actor takes on a multitude of roles. Paul Simpson, who appeared in And Did Those Feet, is fantastic, as is Cartwright's son James, both of whom are involved in the play's best scene with Eve Robertson and Joanna Higson, two young women they meet on a night out, all four looking for something more than a simple sexual encounter.
Julie Riley is brilliant in one scene in which she attempts to seduce a totally comatose Simpson before dissolving into tears, while Antony Bessick plays some great roles, most notably The Professor, who carries out roadside interviews on a tape recorder which will document the lives on the road forever.
There's swearing a-plenty, on-stage smoking and it's not one for the purists, but for those of us who remember Thatcher's Britain, it's both hilarious and bleak.
John Henshaw, brilliant in parts such as these. It almost as if Jim Cartwright wrote the pieces for him, though the reality is Mr. Henshaw was still behind the Counter when this was written.
John Henshaw, brilliant in parts such as these. It almost as if Jim Cartwright wrote the pieces for him, though the reality is Mr. Henshaw was still behind the Counter when this was written.
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