Road Review – Johnny Vegas pulls punches in bitter response to Thatcher’s Britain | platform

SElena Cartmell’s vision of Jim Cartwright’s play is great. Too large to fit inside the regular ring of the auditorium, even when the director uses the full height of the interior space, sending her actors up the stairs and making them exit the upper level. What’s more, before the show and in the interim, its production extends to the wider building.

Leslie Travers’ set is scattered like so much post-industrial rubble in corners, where, if you get there early and time it right, you’ll see actors performing sketches of working-class life: some pre-gig preparation; Drunken darts game. A lost soul wandering around with her shopping cart.

The intrusion excites the audience and expands the picture of the playwright’s life. The director seems to suggest that this community not only lives around a Lancashire street in 1986 as the playwright envisioned it, but lives in and around us. You begin to look at your fellow spectators and wonder if they too are part of the Cartwright fabric.

Likewise, Cartmel’s approach is bold towards the actors. She puts them on a quick, low heat and heats them to a boil. Playing Scullery, the disheveled Johnny Vegas is both tough and feisty, making his introductions to a short cast of characters, whether it’s Leslie Joseph as an old sweetheart singing for her dinner or Laura Ellsworthy and Lucy Beaumont as town girls.

None of this diminishes the bitterness of Cartwright’s play, which was written in anger at neglect and poverty in Thatcher’s Britain, but it is more bitter than expressed politically. His characters dream of the beauty of Otis Redding’s Try a Little Tenderness, while keeping their beauty at bay. Insults come first, demands for money come second, and friendship is difficult to gain.

A collection of unrelated monologues and one-on-one conversations, The Road can seem like a series of test pieces. Cartmel’s actors, including Tom Courtenay who was previously credited as a man plagued by nostalgia, would pass such a test easily, but the fragmented structure makes it easier to like than care. However, as the centerpiece of the Royal Exchange’s 50th anniversary season, the production is lively, exciting and delightfully theatrical.