Fifty years after it was first published, Alan Sillitoe's novel shows no sign of going out of style. Its credibility was reconfirmed when Arctic Monkeys borrowed the line "Whatever it is people say I am, that's what I'm not" for the title of their first album, and Sillitoe's evocation of "the best and bingiest glad-time of the week" might have come straight from Alex Turner's lyric book.
Amanda Whittington's adaptation, produced by Oldham Coliseum in association with Harrogate Theatre, proves that the problem of binge drinking is hardly new, even if the social circumstances have changed. Sillitoe's antihero, Arthur Seaton, drinks like there's no tomorrow because there may well not have been one. Today's underage drinkers cannot cite the imminence of a nuclear apocalypse as an excuse.
Joyce Branagh's production has the urgency of a pub crawl as last orders draw near. Joanna Parker's design, meanwhile, conjures a smoggy East Midlands yesteryear of back-to-backs and bicycle factories - images, it should be remembered, that had no place in English literature until Sillitoe put them there - with an end terrace serving as a projection screen for a montage of pop-cultural references.
Photographs of milk bars and Bill Haley are a sad reminder that the era of the teenager began when Arthur Seaton was already too old to be one. With his limp quiff and white-knuckled aggression, Oliver Farnworth's Arthur has the glazed look of a man who realises he may have missed his historical time slot and has only domestic conformity to look forward to. In the final scene, he advances up the aisle as if towards the scaffold - a bleak reminder of the days when working-class life was not so much an opportunity as a sentence.
· Until Saturday. Box office: 0161-624 2829.
