How Soon is Now?
Sian Owen
Box of Tricks Theatre Company
Lowry, Salford
October 1-3, 2026; 2hrs 10mins
(also at Storyhouse, Chester (October 6-7); Dukes Lancaster (October 8-10); Theatre Royal Wakefield (October 12-13); Loading Bay, Bradford (October 15-16); ARC, Stockton (October 27-28); Sheffield Playhouse (November 4-5); Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough (November 6-7).
Imagine a dingy black-box nightclub, somewhere in Manchester on News Years Eve in 1997. In fact you probably don’t need to imagine, because most of the audience can remember.
How Soon is Now? is like having your youth played back to you on stage: the politics, the clothes, the dancing, the music...
The music is excellent. From the start our intrepid young clubbers Angie (Kaitlyn Akinpelumi) and Polly (Laura Robinson) set the scene with The Smiths: "Take me out tonight, where there’s music and there’s people and they’re young and alive". There’s something about the two-tone simplicity of a melody meandering back and forth to the most hedonistic, care-free poetry of teenage friendship: "and if a double-decker bus crashed into us, to die by your side is such a heavenly way to die".
The theme of the show shines through from the start: fun, escape, hardship and reimagining.
It's a particularly good time to remember these songs. In the early days of Andy Burnham’s premiership, can we feel an echo of that Labour landslide of 1997? Is this a moment to remember that hope, that youth, those songs, and that moment in our lives?
And yet this isn’t a chronologically accurate story. In musical terms there’s a theme, but anything can happen.
Time stretches and bends, as DJ Jim Spin tells us. Played by Darragh Cowlry, clad head to toe in green Adidas with a bucket hat and a Manc accent, drifting between twisting his melon, spinning the decks and playing bass in the on-stage band, he’s like a dancing wizard of music and moves, narrating the night away, controlling the soundtrack to our youth. It’s magic.
The best drama is the second storyline, about the coercive control experienced by Jean (Bethan McLean), who has arrived unaccompanied and scared in Manchester, with nowhere to go and no one to see, escaping her tormentor - the charmingly sinister Carl (Theo Woolford, also magnificent on drums, occasional guitar and dancing) - and the tiny village in South Wales where she packed chicken for a living until she told her boss to F-off.
More drama unfolds as we hear the harrowing domestic violence stories from Angie and Polly, and it becomes clear that this is a story not only of the club, but what it gives these three women, in contrast to the feelings they have come to escape.
There’s an atmosphere in this show that’s electric. The second act is a little slower, with some relentless despair that is essentially resolved in the final moments when the women sing She’s a Waterfall, and the climax of the piece, where Jean finally takes her coat off.
There is beauty in the mismatch of songs, giving lyric flavour rather than narrative, and often chronologically inaccurate to the setting but perfect for mood.
The uncontrolled dancing gives us the feelings we remember from back then. Where the texture is thin with three musicians (Cowlry, Woolford and LJ Willow on guitar), we borrow more epic scale from the remembered versions in the recordings in our minds.
These singing actors and actor-musicians (also all dancers) work hard. There are six of them and the show is over two hours, without an exit. It’s kind of a concept show, kind of a jukebox musical, and kind of an immersion back into the club world of our own past. It could be a feminist piece, a historical story of lives full of misery, but also full of dancing, of great songs and of hope. According to The Smiths there is a light that never goes out. Quite a time to remember that.
More info and tickets here
