1974 was the year of Wombling Merry Christmas, of Morecambe and Wise dancing with Pan's People and Henry Cooper exhorting blokes to splash it all over. It was also the year that Willy Russell proved he could write structured, well-made plays.
Breezeblock Park, the story of a grisly Christmas on a Liverpool council estate, was so sturdily built that advocates of Russell's looser, more militant style saw it as a betrayal. He was even collared by a furious member of the Workers' Revolutionary Party, who accused him of undermining the class struggle by presenting the proletariat in a bad light.
Russell was doing nothing of the sort: he was merely observing that the simmering tensions within all families are most likely to boil over in the pressure cooker of Christmas. But he chose to do so at a time when pressure cookers, fondue sets, hostess trollies and teasmaids were still perceived as a pretty neat idea.
Glen Walford's strongly cast production makes a hugely entertaining period piece, though its comic premise would scarcely be credible today. With branches of Ann Summers in every high street, it is inconceivable that someone would gullibly believe a vibrator to be the latest in cordless cocktail stirrers.
Pauline Daniels turns in a wonderfully pursed performance as Betty, the woman who gets the wrong end of the stick, as it were. And there are fine contributions from the rest of the cast, all of whom seem, with hindsight, to be prototypes for the Royle Family. The programme even reprints a fan letter Russell once received from Caroline Aherne ("I'm 22-and-a-half, full of fun and there's plenty of mileage to be had out of me"). So it's official - you saw them here first.
· Until January 10. Box office: 0151-709 4776.
