CP Taylor could rightfully claim to be the first community playwright. Of the 70-plus plays he produced before his death in 1981, the great majority were committed to giving miners, shipbuilders and dock workers their voice. It seems fitting that he should be commemorated by a warehouse.
In fact, such is the measure of Taylor's posthumous reputation that, from 2007, he will be commemorated by two warehouses, when Live, the tiny theatre on the quayside dedicated to his memory, celebrates its 30th anniversary by expanding into the building next door. For the final production prior to refurbishment, Live returns to its origins, restaging the first drama it commissioned.
To call this an exercise in gentle nostalgia under-emphasises the point, as A Nightingale Sang was already just that when it appeared in 1977. It's a domestic drama detailing the experience of a Tyneside family throughout the second world war, replete with spam sandwiches, servicemen bearing gifts of exotic French underwear, and not a few hearty renditions of popular songs from the period.
On one level, it has no greater literary pretensions than a Catherine Cookson novel. Yet Taylor had a unique ability to monitor massive political shifts through the drama of everyday lives. When the father of the household takes up with the Communist party it's a grand source of comic aggrandisement with his passionately Catholic wife. Yet the fractious domestic atmosphere reflects the fractured political landscape of Europe at that time.
Max Roberts's production is packed with canny performances. Laura Norton and Victoria Elliott touchingly rehearse the same wartime mistake of falling in love with the wrong men on the basis that there may not be many left. Donald McBride's Granda is delightful in his sardonic devotion to his dead whippet. Best of all, David Whitakar's Da immediately responds to a crisis by loudly making his own entertainment: a painfully tuned reminder that in the days before television, families really did sit round the piano - whether they wanted to or not.
· Until April 29. Box office: 0191-232 1232.
