Karaoke night in Newcastle is not something a responsible critic would normally steer you towards, but there are exceptions - particularly when the man behind the venture is writer Lee Hall, the creator of Billy Elliott.
NE 1 is a portmanteau piece in which miscellaneous North-easterners take stock at the start of the new millennium. Phonetically, the central Newcastle postcode could be interpreted as "anyone", and it is this get-up-and-have-a-go ethos that gives the evening its thread of continuity. Hall places us in a heaving karaoke joint, where written sequences are punctuated with the unscripted comedy of audience members mumbling into the microphone. It fosters a sense that everyone is a potential participant - the spotlight really could fall on anyone.
Hall is but one of an extraordinary procession of North-eastern writers whose reputations have been exported worldwide, but whose hearts remain packed in the tiny, quayside warehouse where Live Theatre is housed. Alan Plater, Peter Flannery and Ian La Frenais have all contributed, but the attention inevitably falls on: who will emerge as the next Lee Hall?
Hall's contribution is the irrepressible MC, overworked and overmarried: first to Sheila and subsequently, and simultaneously, to Karen - though he fondly boasts that he only ever got their names mixed up once. A chief drawback of bigamy, we learn, is keeping in shape with so many separate suppers inside you.
Peter Flannery - best-known for Our Friends in the North - supplies a beguiling nocturne, in which a melancholic, middle-aged businessman drives endlessly through the night and out of his wife's affections. Tom Hadaway adds the bitter reflections of a wrongfully accused Irish woman whose young life was extinguished in Durham jail.
Two items stand out, however, as disturbingly original variations on the theme of obsession, with virtuoso turns from actors Tracy Whitwell and Michael Hodgson. Gill Adams's evocation of a charity-shop worker's pursuit of a George Michael lookalike provides a hilarious opening to the evening, which takes a distinctly creepy turn in the poet Sean O'Brien's contribution - a misogynistic barman with something unpleasant at the core of his being and something even worse in the cellar. Monologues are much easier if you are meant to warm to the speaker: O'Brien adds menacingly to the chill drifting in off the Tyne.
Until December 14. Box office: 0191-232 1232.
