‘England’s cruel,” says Eddie in Jim Cartwright’s debut play, Road, first performed at the Royal Court in 1986. Cartwright’s powerful snapshot of northern life is a searing indictment of Thatcher’s England, where jobs and hope are scarce. “There is no solution,” as another character puts it.
Three decades on, in another era of welfare cuts, Road feels chillingly resonant. Rereading the play, director John Tiffany was struck by how the sort of working-class lives depicted by Cartwright have changed for the worse. “It felt as though it was written from a place where things couldn’t get any worse, but they have,” he says. “The rich have got richer and the poor have got poorer.”
When Lancashire-born Cartwright wrote the play, in the mid-1980s, he was among the swelling numbers of the unemployed and had witnessed firsthand the sort of lives that Road portrays. It began as a series of scraps: scenes and characters without a structure. The Royal Court saw potential in those fragments and commissioned Cartwright, who was an actor at this point, to write a full play.
The play flits in and out of the lives of the residents of one street, stitching together a series of intimate scenes and monologues. “I wasn’t sure what to make of the script when I first read it,” says Neil Dudgeon, who appeared in the original production. “Every scene, every speech is so beautifully, strangely written. It’s poetry as speech.”
Matching the brutal beauty of the dialogue was the play’s striking promenade form, which took audiences on a journey around the Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court. “In the scenes where the characters are talking directly to the audience, you have to actually look them in the eye and engage them,” he remembers. “And sometimes they would talk back. Which was a bit weird until we got used to it. Weird, but eventually thrilling.”
Lesley Sharp was also in the original cast and describes the play and its innovative form as “a creative game-changer for all of us”. After moving downstairs to the Royal Court’s main stage, Road was also made into a film for the BBC by director Alan Clarke in 1987, helping to launch the careers of young actors including Sharp, Dudgeon and Jane Horrocks, for whom Cartwright later wrote The Rise and Fall of Little Voice.
“I saw Road at the Royal Court Upstairs when it was first put on and loved it,” says Horrocks. “It was an extraordinary piece of work and something I’d never seen before – visceral, emotional and memorable.” She was particularly struck by the famous final scene, in which the Otis Redding song “Try a Little Tenderness” is played from start to finish. “I’d never been to a play where a whole record was played.”
In the film version the camera replaces narrator character Scullery as the storyteller. Shot entirely on Steadicam – one of Clarke’s aesthetic hallmarks – the film moves with the characters, who walk as they deliver soliloquies. “The film and the audience is constantly moving, constantly restless, just like in the theatre,” says Dudgeon. Horrocks feels that the screen adaptation, with its close-up, gritty realism, is “starker and much more brutal than the stage version”.
Tiffany’s new production at the Royal Court aims to celebrate the play’s history while also reimagining it. “It’s absolutely Road as written,” he says, “but it’s a very different presentation of it.” This revival is abandoning the now familiar promenade form, but it still bridges the usual gap between performers and audience. Chloe Lamford’s design features a set of steps that will connect the stage with the audience, allowing the cast to get in among the spectators.
The play has particular significance for Tiffany, who first read it while at sixth form college in Huddersfield. “It blew my mind,” he says. “I didn’t think that plays could be written in my voice, in my dialect, my accent, that were also poetic and lyrical without feeling pretentious.” In the language of the play, lyricism is flecked with grit. Cartwright’s characters talk about life as being “like walking through meat in high heels” or “swimming in ache”. As Horrocks puts it, the speeches in Road are “like open sores”.
The play’s structure, too, subverts familiar forms. “There is a coherence in the unity of time and place,” explains Tiffany. “It’s really classical in that way, which is amazing, because it starts at sunset and goes on to sunrise. However, there’s something about the structure that still feels very modern. It’s like an accumulation: they all layer on top of each other, these lives that we engage with and look into.”
Talking to Tiffany in the aftermath of the surprise general election result – “I think it is an absolute reaction against austerity” – and the fire at Grenfell Tower, conversation inevitably veers into politics. “It’s all on topic with Road,” says Tiffany. Though his production is sticking firmly with the time and place of Cartwright’s script, it also speaks to the present-day context of austerity, food banks and housing crisis.
“Those people are poorer now,” says Tiffany, “and austerity has really started to dissolve the structure of civic life as we know it.” One of the most powerful things about Road, says Dudgeon, is that “it shows ordinary, struggling working-class characters and makes them into heroes”. Now, even more so than when the play was written, it’s rare to see honest yet positive portrayals of working-class life.
“The inequality and hopelessness of then is at least as prevalent now,” Dudgeon continues. “And I think the strength and humour of the characters is as beautiful and funny and moving now as it was then.”
“I think the play had such impact because of its raw outspoken truth,” suggests Horrocks. Sharp agrees: “There was a sense that the north was being slowly starved to death, that oxygen was being cut off, and Jim’s play was full of that. It’s impressive in its lack of tub-thumping and grandstanding, heartbreaking in its cry for dignity and justice to be restored to the old powerhouses of the UK. It was a hugely political play in a brand new form. Jim left behind rhetoric and polemic and quietly delivered a battle cry, a sob for the forgotten.”
That battle cry has become a modern classic, regularly taught in schools and performed around the world. Road had its New York premiere in 1988, in a production at La Mama starring Kevin Bacon and Joan Cusack – though the New York Times suggested that something was lost in the journey across the Atlantic. In 1995, the play came home to the north-west with a production at the Royal Exchange theatre in Manchester featuring Matthew Dunster. This new production, though, is the first major London revival since the play’s Royal Court debut.
Despite the Sloane Square location, Tiffany wants his production to feel “very northern”, honouring the impact the play made on him and fellow northerners. “People talk about this play – certainly a lot of actors and directors who are from the north – as a fundamental moment in their journey into theatre,” he says. “It’s talked of with such fondness, such pride.”
Sharp describes the writing of Road in 1986 as “an urgent response to the society that was being unravelled and reimagined under our noses”. More than 30 years later, it still has a sense of urgency. “It’s nostalgic while being prophetic,” says Tiffany, observing how the drama both looks to the past and anticipates the widening gap between rich and poor. His production, he hopes, will demonstrate how relevant – politically and artistically – Road remains. “It’s another chance to explore the play and to see its place in theatre history, and how much it still says about now.”
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Road opens at the Royal Court, London SW1W, on 21 July. royalcourttheatre.com.
