Tanika Gupta's salty new version of Brecht is both in yer face and on yer bike - it requires a hardy volunteer to ignite a pedal-powered lighting rig. Rarely has a staging of Brecht's difficult political parable generated such electricity. Stephen Powell, director of the National Theatre's tour for students, has turned this play into a theatre workshop that is also the show. The audience are not so much on the edge of their seats as hardly ever in them.
It's tricksy - and very Brechtian, of course - and turns the evening, as the author envisaged, into an interactive experience. Whether he had an earnest student union debate in mind is a moot point; but you have to admire anything that has a captive crowd with Setzuan on the syllabus shrieking their approval rather than politely sitting to attention.
There only remains to negotiate the technical difficulty of slipping under the radar of the Brecht estate. These hallowed guardians of the text, much like the executors of Beckett, do not take kindly to mucking about with Brecht: a rich concept given that Brecht enjoyed mucking about with any theatrical convention he could. Powell has come up with an ingenious ruse - a naked red light bulb suspended above the action that is lit when echt-Brecht is in progress and goes out when liberties are being taken. Needless to say, the fixture flickers so regularly that one hopes the on-stage electrician has several spare fuses handy.
Gupta's breezy colloquialism observes the spirit rather than the letter of the text, and is lustily put across by a versatile, multi-ethnic cast. The abstract problem of an allegorical society governed by gods is solved by suggesting that our new deities could be rock stars, supermodels and footballers. A sop to a youthful audience, perhaps, yet it seemed briefly that an obstreperous, dead German polemicist had somehow snuck into the pantheon.
Ends tonight. Box office: 0161-274 0600. Then tours to London, Warwick, Harrogate, Norwich, Brecon, Worthing and Truro.
