Leeds Playhouse – until Saturday 29th September 2018
Reviewed By Dawn Smallwood
5*****
Jim Cartwright’s Road opens at Leeds Playhouse’s new Pop-Up Theatre, a temporary venue, while the main building is currently being renovated. The new Pop-Up season at the Playhouse is unique with an Ensemble Company of Northern actors performing in the variety of productions scheduled.
Road first premiered in 1986 and is about the lives of people who live in a deprived neighbourhood in Lancashire with unemployment being high, the lack of opportunities and also so little for them aspire to. Cartwright’s play explores the individual residents who live on the road and Scullery (Joe Alessi) whose rum dependent guides the audience to who is who.
The Pop-Up Theatre’s space is used very well with Hayley Grindle’s incredible staging of the road with its set and it is cleverly arranged and the space in the auditorium is used to the maximum. The audience is able to follow the action inside the row of terraced houses and also outside. The lighting, courtesy of Paul Lovett, is creative with dimmed obscured lighting highlighting the grim reality of the neighbourhood and the bright lights guiding maximum focus to the personal stories being told. There is Mark Melville’s soundscapes which haunt the poignancy of the residents’ situations.
Road, this production under the direction of Amy Leach, is intense, bold, explicit, unforgiving and raucous but fits the fragile spirit of the characters portrayed amid the strong language, adult themes and the raised emotions. Each of the characters has had hopes and memories but these hopes are quashed into pessimism, despair and apathy. There are some entertaining moments how the residents can switch off and have a good time with the playing of well known 1980s pop songs however entertainment and escapism quickly switches to desperation and self destruction with execessive alcohol consumption.
The ensemble cast of Alessi, Lladel Bryant, Darren Kuppan, Jo Mousley, Dan Parr, Tessa Parr, Robert Pickavance, Susan Twist and Elexi Walker do a superb portrayal of its residents and most of them doubling up as two characters. One must look forward to seeing them star in subsequent productions this season and getting to know them better on stage.
Road reminds how parallel it is today with many living in deprived areas and how these neighbourhoods are gradually being forgotten with austerity cuts, welfare reforms and lesser investment in such areas which evidently are having this impact notably poverty on its residents.
An intensely moving production which thought provokes the audience with maximum engagement and the linking of emotions. One must admire the fighting spirit of the forgotten community and such bravery is entwined in this production. Road is excellent and unmissable and Cartwright’s piece will resonant the personal and socio-economical issues that are addressed and this is not just confined to the North of England but it could be anywhere.