The inhabitants of a yard of run-down rented shacks in Trinidad just after the war all have their worries and their dreams. Sophia worries how she will get the money to buy school uniform for her bright daughter Esther, who has won a scholarship to high school; Rosa worries about the new life inside her and dreams of a life with her lover Ephraim; Ephraim thinks only of escaping his job on the trolley buses and a new beginning in England. The word "Liverpool" rolls off his tongue as if it were Eden. Over them all shines the lazy Caribbean moon. "I wonder whether in bigger parts of the world it seems so close?" wonders Rosa.
This small world, bursting at the seams with life, is expertly conjured in Errol John's 1958 play, a heart-warming soap opera of Port-of-Spain lowlife that must have seemed quite radical over 40 years ago for the way it put black people's lives centre stage. It perhaps says something about our theatre today that Eclipse, a new organisation aiming to raise the profile of black theatre productions, should look to a play that is almost half a century old for its first project. Where are the plays that followed on from John's pioneering success? Where, for that matter, are the plays about black experience, of this size and scope, that are being written today? Eclipse has a massive job on its hands.
John's play is well-crafted, and with its array of losers, lovers, lovable rogues and dreamers, impossible to dislike. But it does hail from another era, and its predictable plotting and characters owe a great deal to stereotype. The drama's lack of sophistication is highlighted by a production that is atmospheric, but that too often makes naturalism seem cumbersome. One or two of the actors are not entirely audible, particularly in the first half, but Victor Romero Evans as a man eager to escape his family's legacy, and Dystin Johnson, who purrs and spits as the eternal mother-figure Sophia, raise the temperature in a theatre that was dispiritingly cold and empty.
· Until Saturday. Box office: 0115-941 9419. Then touring.
