Selina Cartmell’s vision for Jim Cartwright’s play is big. Too big to be contained within the regular loop of the auditorium, even when the director uses the full height of the in-the-round space, sending her actors up ladders and getting them to pop out from the upper level. More than that, before the show and in the interval, her production spills into the wider building.
Leslie Travers’s set is scattered like so much post-industrial debris into corners where, if you get there early and time it right, you will see actors perform sketches of working-class life: some pre-party preening; a boozy game of darts; a lost soul wandering with her shopping trolley.
The intrusion excites the audience and extends the playwright’s slice-of-life portrait. This community, the director seems to suggest, is not just living around one Lancashire road in 1986 as the playwright envisaged, but in and around us. You start looking at your fellow spectators and wondering if they too are part of Cartwright’s tapestry.
Singing for her supper … Lesley Joseph. Photograph: Ros Kavanagh
Similarly bold is Cartmell’s approach to the actors. She sets them off at a fast simmer and heats them to boiling point. Playing Scullery, a dishevelled Johnny Vegas is at once measured and pugnacious, punching out his introductions to a short-fuse cast of characters, be that Lesley Joseph as an old dear singing for her supper or Laura Elsworthy and Lucy Beaumont as girls on the town.
None of this diminishes the sourness of Cartwright’s play, written in anger at the neglect and poverty of Thatcher’s Britain, but more bitter than politically articulate. His characters dream of the beauty of Otis Redding’s Try a Little Tenderness, while locking their own beauty away. Insults come first, demands for cash come second, friendship is hard won.
A collage of unrelated monologues and two-handers, Road can seem like a sequence of audition pieces. Cartmell’s actors, including a pre-recorded Tom Courtenay as a man crippled by nostalgia, would effortlessly pass such an audition, but the fragmentary structure makes it easier to be impressed than to care. Still, as the centrepiece of the Royal Exchange’s 50th anniversary season, the production is exuberant, abrasive and giddily theatrical.
At the Royal Exchange, Manchester, until 14 March.