Road
- Linda Isted
- 4 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Jim Cartwright
Royal Exchange production
Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester
February 13-March 14, 2026; 2hrs 45 mins
(Sold out - returns online; daily banquette seat sales in person from box office or by phone from noon)
We should perhaps call it a cashmere occasion rather than a glittering one. With the temperatures still feeling arctic in Manchester it was not surprising the audience for the Royal Exchange’s 50th anniversary gala night had for the most part left the sparkles at home and come in their big coats and best jumpers.
Which was appropriately ironic, given the threadbare and desperate circumstances of the residents of Jim Cartwright’s Road.
The play too is celebrating an anniversary, the 40th since its first production in London. Margaret Thatcher was in her seventh year as Prime Minister, and Jim Cartwright pulled no punches in his depiction of the effects of high unemployment and low wages on the Northern working class.
Not much seems to have changed for this community of abandoned souls, living on their abandoned street in an abandoned but immediately recognisable corner of the North.
This production, designed by Leslie Travers with lighting by Aideen Malone, has cleverly melded the play’s peripatetic structure into the bones of the Royal Exchange, using all its levels and its aerial capacity to swing the action from house to house and room to room. Women yell from upstairs windows on its balconies, lads loll on sofas and swig from cans down below. Girls tug at their short skirts and carefully hold their shoes behind them as they clamber up steps. And as the action moves among the audience in the interval, actors swing lazily from lampposts and loudly admire what people are wearing from perches above the crowd.
Our guide to this microcosm of 1980s Britain is Scullery, played by Johnny Vegas. The role is part narrator, part tour-guide, part ringmaster, and for a performer who has done little stage drama he holds the centre and the reins admirably.
In fact the main cast members all have high television profiles, and this omnipresence in our own front rooms is echoed in the TV screens that dangle above them. This third eye is judiciously used to shock us with close ups - not least that of Tom Courtenay as Jerry, with a jaundiced stare and a properly Shakespearean mastery of the soliloquy.
Lesley Joseph, the snobby neighbour from a des-res Essex street in Birds of a Feather, is her splendid antithesis here – pottering slowly about in a fug of booze and dementia. The set dressing of her room is perfection, with its powder compact, two-ringed gas stove and milk shared with the inevitable (invisible) cat.
Lucy Beaumont and Shobna Gulati also inhabit their precarious roles with grit and sensitivity, characteristics that sum up Cartwright’s writing, and which keep it fresh and startlingly modern.
Selina Cartmell, the Royal Exchange’s new creative director and director of this production, describes it as “an authentic love letter to the North”. It is, but it is much more. As a child of pre-modernisation south London I recognised chunks of my background (not least the ever-present ciggie) that were the same in 1986 and remain recognisable still.
The poetry of Cartwright’s masterpiece is mesmerising, and Cartmell allows both it and the rest of the resilient characters to flow freely up and down their personal highways. It's a privilege to watch.
More info and tickets here
