Swearing, if done with enough conviction and with attention to the rhythms of language, can be a beautiful thing. Which is just as well because in Jim Cartwright’s play, Road, there is a lot of swearing. An awful lot. It paints a true picture of the characters’ situation.
Make no mistake, their situation is bleak. This 1980s Britain, in the hard hit North-West. Thatcher's cuts have bitten deep and characters in this deep dark comedy are permanently out of work, their lives fuelled by drink, bad sex and despair, shot through with occasional brief glimpses of hope.
The play is constructed as a series of sketches, each an expression of life behind the walls of the houses along a street so bare and broken it is known simply as Road. Coronation Street it ain't. Albert square doesn't come close.
The format allows for some fine performances. This brilliant cast squeeze every drop of emotion out of their characters' sad lives, for whom the greatest sadness of all is that they know they are doomed. They are like lost souls on a sinking ship. There’s the Professor, bravely and pointlessly recording snippets of street wisdom by his neighbours, and Jerry (each played by Pete Bagley), mourning his lost past. There’s Molly (Emma Withers), a genteel old lady who swigs vodka from the bottle. There’s Carol (Georgia Kelly), who’s bruised elegy: “Where’s nice - f*****d off; where’s soft – gone hard,” tolls a passing bell. And there's Scullery (Dan Gough), a leering goggle eyed street rat who sees all and judges nothing, and guides us through this mess.
This would be unbearably bleak, and frankly boring, were it not for the sheer energy and conviction of the performances and the lyricism of the writing. Only occasionally did it go a bit too far, as in Joey’s (Pete Meredith) slow suicide scene with Clare (Karen Evans), which like opera went on for too long, though the performance of it was great. Marion’s (Emma Withers) magnificent, drunken showdown with Brian (Steve Brown), which spilled out into the auditorium, brought a round of applause in its own right.
Are things so different now? Go down any city centre on a Saturday night and see. What was missing from this Road was drugs, which would have been there in real time and which bring a different kind of escape. Booze brings all forms of people together, and so this sad, magnificent, tortured, forlorn, beautiful street full of proud, defeated, self-defeating people stuck together because all they had was each other.
Road is a gut wrenching reminder of how close to despair many of us can come, and a warning of what might be yet to come.
Nick Le Mesurier
Road is set in a northern town where once there would have been “trouble at ‘t’ mill”. Trouble is there are no mills any more. And the mines are disappearing rapidly in this, the year after the end of “’t’ strike”. Factories have closed, too. So have the offices adjoining them.
One of the more poignant moments in a bracing plunge back into the murky waters of the 1980's is when a still youthful former clerk looks back at the job that gave some order and meaning to her life.
And now? “Every day is like swimming in ache,” she says in one of several poetic lines that light up Jim Cartwright’s play like shafts of sunlight piercing a steady drizzle and the heavy showers of four-letter words that rain down from the stage at regular intervals. This is not an evening for those easily offended.
Road was first performed in 1986 at the Royal Court in Sloane Square, Chelsea, surrounded by bijou mews properties that were being restored by those doing very nicely out of the deregulation bestowed on the City of London by the Thatcher government.
Compare and contrast with this Road to nowhere – a dead end in every sense of the word. Nobody appears to have taken Norman Tebbit’s advice, got on their effing bikes and effed off out of it. “We’ll live and die in these towns,” by Coventry band The Enemy provides the ideal soundtrack for the final curtain. By that time the Criterion cast have given it their all, most of the actors taking on several parts. The exception is Dan Gough who plays the sole role of our guide for the evening with a rumbustious buoyancy and conspiratorial sense of mischief. Scullery by name; scallywag by disposition.
With the help of a splendidly flexible set, designed by Simon Sharpe, Scullery allows us to peep into broken lives.
Venom and menace, bitterness and self-pity abound. So does alcohol and casual sex.
There are some riotous moments, including a few forays by the cast into the audience. But for me the most touching scenes are the soliloquies. Anne-marie Greene captures the desperation of a mother at the end of her tether as she sits on the edge of the stage and talks frankly to the audience through clouds of cigarette smoke. Pete Bagley looks back fondly on his days as a national serviceman while ironing his tie. What he really liked, though, was coming home to the Road. “There were so many jobs then,” he recalls. “Everybody had an apprenticeship in something.”
Cartwright’s play seems surprisingly relevant over 30 years on. After all, we have another female prime minister promising to do something about those “just getting by”. Trouble is that she has been rather busy just lately doing trade deals with ruthless leaders in the post-Brexit world that people in former mill towns such as this one voted for as a last hope.
Chris Arnot