Even the best roads need occasional resurfacing. Fifteen years after it took the theatrical world by storm, Jim Cartwright's debut is beginning to show signs of wear, so the Pilot theatre company has treated it to a multimedia makeover.
You know it must be Pilot when your vision distorts and the seat begins to vibrate. Marcus Romer subjects Road to the full Pilot treatment, with disorientating video sequences, CCTV relays and throbbing techno. The remix approach works well for the young audience it targets. Yet it only emphasises how quickly Cartwright has been tamed, approved and accepted on to the syllabus.
Romer argues that the gap between rich and poor is wider than ever, and that there has never been a better time to reprise this play. But a few inserted references to Pop Idol and Posh'n'Becks aside, a piece that once traded in up-to-the-minute documentary realism now seems to be lagging behind events. It is noticeable that the real social problem to have erupted in Cartwright's Oldham heartland over the past few years - the racial tension between white and Asian communities - is never mentioned.
For all of Pilot's technological overlay, Road seems to be receding into the balmy nostalgia embraced by some of its characters, such as the lonely pensioner who wonders what became of "courting", or the beaten wife who hopelessly wishes "it could be before again". "Before" was a time when Cartwright's bare-knuckle similes and weird transpositions of nouns stunned you with the force of unprecedented theatrical poetry, and had no need of amplified video commentaries to push the point across.
Romer does, however, draw some visceral performances from a fine cast. Robert Pickavance is suitably vile as a foul-mouthed function DJ, and the magnificent Nicky Goldie - an actress compared with whom Kathy Burke is the most mellifluous expositor of the Queen's English - gives a great, coarse-throated turn as the sour, sex-starved housewife with "skin like ham".
It is still a great play, but Road is now less a docu-drama than a trip down memory lane. Sadly, we will never have "before" again.
7#183; Until September 28. Box office: 01904 623568. Then tours to Wakefield, Mansfield, Manchester and across Britain until March.
